Fill My Lungs Up
by heisalonetonight
Summary: When a last-minute organ donor means Adrien Agreste does not die, he is faced with a new dilemma: he suddenly has a whole rest of his life. What is he going to do with it? / Ladynoir & Adrienette. 17yo Adrien never went to school. Adrien is still Chat Noir. The first chap is Adrien almost dying, so skip it if you don't want to read it. Become an organ donor today!
1. You're Not Dead, Now What?

When you spend the first ten years of your life watching your mother die of the very same disease you spend the next seven years of your life battling, it tends to put you out a little. Adrien didn't have any delusions about it, really. His lungs were giving up, and sure he'd been on the transplant list for the past three years of his life - when he'd started to go _really _downhill - but he knew he was dying. He'd watched his father drag out Emilie's death with all of his greatest fortune behind him, but Adrien's mother had been ill, and suffering, and she had needed a machine to breathe for her, and another to suck out what she could not find the energy to cough up. That was not a life for Adrien. His father had about disowned him when it came out ("Father, no. I don't want it," Adrien had said, and Gabriel had tried to force him to, anyway, except the nurses had refused), but Adrien did not want the entire Agreste fortune struggling to keep him alive. Don't get him wrong - he loved living. He loved the wind in his hair and the view of Paris and all of the world that he would never get to see, he loved that this universe stretched and went on forever and he could spend every second of his life - whether it was seventeen years or seventy - trying to see all of it, and he wouldn't manage even a fraction.

But since he was _going _to die, he wanted to do it on his terms. Not in the middle of running away. You know? He'd face it standing, and like the man he'd never get to be, and with the same stubborn lift of the jaw that he saw in Ladybug, sometimes.

Ladybug.

Adrien lay very still in his hospital bed, but Plagg knew he was thinking about Ladybug, because his thumb twisted the ring on his right-hand ring finger, idly. Ladybug was out there, somewhere. He'd initially tried to return the ring to Master Fu, when he'd caught this cold and realised that it was bad; Master Fu had refused it. "There is only one Chat Noir, Adrien. Until Plagg is ready to select a different Chosen," and Plagg would never be ready, not until Adrien was still, and white, and cold, "I am afraid you have no other choice."

"Ladybug needs a partner who can protect her."

"I think you will find," Master Fu had reassured him, and closed his fingers around the ring, there, in his palm, "Ladybug is very capable of protecting herself."

And Adrien believed that. Really, he did. So he'd taken the ring with him.

"You want me to call her?" Plagg offered.

Adrien had thought about asking for her. Ladybug knew he was ill. Maybe not exactly what it was, but she knew. She'd been around the year before it got Really bad, before he got on the transplant list, so she had something to contrast it with - Chat Noir had just _had _the disease, he was just _going _to die of it, but it hadn't even felt real to _him _before three years ago. He hadn't been up to the top of the Eiffel Tower for years. Couldn't waste his breath on the climb.

Ladybug had promised to take him up there, you know, when it was 'time', because he loved that view. He loved this city almost more than life itself. He loved Paris, and the people here, and how much everybody tried. Protecting her - the city - and her people had been (was) one of the best things in his entire life, so far. Ladybug took his breath away (ha), but Paris… Paris constantly surprised him. If he had to choose one city to live in, if he had to choose this one place he would see in all of his life, if he had to pick this one spot - he would choose Paris. So it was a good thing it _was _Paris, he supposed.

Anyway. She'd promised to take him, and he had liked the idea of that, he'd liked thinking he would not die here, in a place like this, looking at this hospital ceiling, alone, with machines beeping beside him and nobody to look after Plagg. But he didn't know if he would last the trip, anymore. And Ladybug was probably at home somewhere, with her family, drinking warm drinks and laughing over some game of scrabble, being happy, with that little scrunch of her nose while she laughed, and he didn't want to interrupt that. Little old him.

No. His answer was no.

Adrien's eyes closed. He was so tired. It was hard to breathe. "Will you press the button?"

Plagg moved quietly to the head of Adrien's bed, to press on the _nurse call _button. There was something terrible in his throat. It was making it hard to not cry. Footsteps, and then the door to his very fancy, hotel-style, very empty hospital room opened, and the nurse must have popped her head in because he could smell the antiseptic of the hallway, which was full of air he wasn't meant to be breathing. The nurse stepped into the room. She shut the door behind her. He heard the seal.

"Sweetheart?" with his eyes closed like that, this nurse - he didn't know her name - wasn't sure he could hear her.

Adrien asked, with some strange waver in his voice (was he afraid? He wasn't sure - was he meant to be? He wanted Ladybug. He wanted to not be -), he asked, "Will you sit with me?"

His father was not coming in. Nathalie had come earlier in the week to drop off his outfit for his next modeling shoot - she either didn't sense the same thing Adrien did, that this was it, that this was all the time he had left, or she didn't care. He chose to believe the first one. It was nicer. When everything you could see and reach and feel was so awful, it was good, to choose the things that made the world a little nicer. He really believed that.

"My name is Francine," the nurse told him, so that he knew. She thought it mattered. He thought it mattered, too. There was a scrape of the ever-empty guest chair beside him, and then someone - Francine - caught up his hand, and Adrien cried his tears out until they were dry, and he complained to poor Francine, the nurse, who probably didn't care, and probably had other patients to get to, and probably had a whole life at home and kids and a family vacation coming up in June (he would never see June; he would never see his father or Ladybug or anyone ever again; the last thing he had seen was the ceiling, and he could not open his eyes again) -

He complained, "I'm scared."

Francine patted his hair back. If he tried very hard, he could almost pretend it was Ladybug. "I know, sweetheart. I know. Does it hurt anywhere? Do you want me to increase your morphine?"

It was hard to breathe.

Was this what dying felt like? He was getting light-headed. What if he died by mistake. What if he didn't see it coming, what if he wasn't done thinking yet, what if it just came and claimed him in the middle of a sen-

* * *

A great, vast black.

It felt empty.

Not like falling, really. Just black, and cold. Like nothing was the space, there, starting at his chest - the space he filled was nothing, and everything was the space around him, and he did not know how to reach it. How do you reach when you are nothing?

What do you reach for when the space around you is everything?

* * *

Adrien woke up.

Understandably enough, this came as something of a shock to him. It felt like he'd been hit by a truck - but a very healthy truck. If someone was ever hit by an ambulance, this was what he imagined it would feel like. Like it would have been better not to have been hit in the first place, but thank goodness there was an ambulance there!

His chest felt light, somehow. He drew a breath inward. It came easily. There was no death rattle. He opened his eyes. The room was filled with sunlight. The curtains were open. At the foot of his bed, hanging like a banner, someone had strung up the word CONGRATULATIONS in gaudy, glittery red letters. The bed was soft beneath him. Adrien could breathe so easily it almost made him want to cry.

"A pair of lungs came in," Plagg said, and Adrien could tell the kwami was being deliberately off-hand about it - "What did I tell you? These things _always _work out, and I _never _get my sympathy camembert!"

That was not what Plagg had told him at all. Chat Noir did not have a great track record with good luck. Usually he got the opposite. Always, he got the opposite. They had been facing this together.

Adrien laughed. It wheezed out of him. It was free, and light, and he wondered if this was what his laughter really sounded like, when he wasn't choking on the same breath. Like windchimes. Adrien loved it. He _loved _it.

"You need to keep your body from rejecting them. There are meds you need to take. But you beat it, kid."

Adrien filled these lungs all the way up with air, a huge gulp of it, this air, this Paris, this world. It came, shaking, out of him.

Plagg asked, "So what are you going to do with the rest of your life?"

* * *

A/N: I have a problem. I just like to angst this child. So much. Please leave a review!


	2. Being in Love with Being Alaugh

It had never really occurred to him to tell Ladybug that he was in love with her.

Like, obviously it had - because obviously he was - but the thought had always been one of those idle things, one of those ideas which cropped up when he thought about _in another life_, in the same way some people thought about what they'd do if they won the lottery. He sort of _had _won the lottery, in a way. Just in the nick of time, too. And now, since, you know, he had never told her - now it had been _four years _of knowing her and Adrien hadn't once thought to drop it in, there, as something she might like to know - well, it seemed weird, now. They were partners. First and foremost, they were a team, and it wasn't like being in love with her would threaten that (Adrien wholly believed, with all of his being, that there wasn't anything that could break the 'them' they were up: they were a team, before anything else), but then, you know, what was he meant to do? Just shove it on her?

He hadn't even had time to think about romance. He'd spent almost all of his teenage years - he was 17 now - thinking that even _looking _in that direction would be selfish. It still felt sort of selfish. Adrien didn't know if his body would accept these new lungs. The scar from the surgery wasn't even finished healing, yet. He hadn't been discharged. There was still a wheelchair rule, even, he had to stay sitting just-in-case, just to be sure his body had a chance to heal - Francine came to push him into the hospital's little front garden, occasionally.

Sometime after lunch today he'd be transferred back to the bigger hospital. This one was a private one. Quite small, but very well-regarded. This was effectively a hospice. He didn't need to be here, anymore, and Francine joked she far preferred this parting than most of her patients'.

Adrien didn't know what to tell Ladybug. He hadn't even texted his father, yet, because he hadn't known what to say there, either - I forgive you for not wanting to go through that again? Why weren't you here? Just a heads up, I'm not dead, not that you care? He thought about texting anybody, and everybody, and he put his phone away.

The garden smelt like primrose; his mother had used to call these sundrop flowers. When he was young, just after she had died, Adrien had kept a vigil eye out for the sundrop flowers. They'd used to sit here, on this bench (he'd parked and struggled out of his wheelchair, to get onto it), in this garden - wasn't it funny how things had come almost full-circle, except he survived it and she had not - they sat here, with these flowers around them, and played the naming game, but sundrops had always been Mum's favourite because they could grow anywhere, really. Anywhere there was sun. She'd said, "Isn't it beautiful, what hope can grow into?"

So Adrien had kept a vigil eye out, because if the sun was hope then these flowers were a promise it was still there.

The flowers were everywhere, today. They bloomed by the dozens. The sun was warm. There wasn't a cloud in the sky.

He breathed in. All the way in. There was a novelty to doing it which made him laugh, every time, and it was stupid, and giddy, and he loved it, because he loved what his laughter sounded like, too, and the fact there was no death rattle, and the fact that he could laugh forever, if he wanted to. If he wanted he could laugh until his stomach hurt, because his lungs did not choke him, and there was more air, and more breath, and more life, and none of it came on a time limit, it was just there.

He must have looked mad, laughing like that. But that was what he did. The idea that someone might see him - the idea that someone might look at him here, on this bench, and wonder what that completely normal 17-year-old was doing, rather than what that very ill 17-year-old was doing, was so wildly outrageous to him that he sat there, heady with laughter, until his stomach _did_ hurt, and his lungs burned (but did not ache), and Francine came out to fetch him because he was going to that other hospital, now, so the doctors could look at him, and make sure he was recovering well, and give him is post-transplant treatment plan, and everything.

And then he was going home.

Adrien hadn't been home in months and months. He was going _home_.

* * *

What Chat Noir did send to Ladybug's yoyo, eventually, was just a simple text: _I got the transplant._

He stared at the message for a little while before he sent it. She wasn't transformed, at the moment. He would have to wait until she did transform, probably tonight - probably she was going to be on patrol. She must be worried. He hadn't told her he was leaving. It had been several weeks.

* * *

Adrien wasn't … Terribly surprised that he didn't fit in very well at his new school. He'd never _been _to a public school before. It had been simply unimaginable - after all, catching Ladybug's cold last month really _had _almost killed him, how was he meant to go to a public school? His father had been right. It was full of germs. It was dangerous. As much as Adrien had longed for friends, he had been better off being the poster child of the Agreste corporation (look at my son - isn't he pretty - such an inspirational person - buy Agreste to support his recovery!), and trying to get an education from the hospital's schoolroom around the fact that half the time, he could not breathe. So first of all he stressed out about getting the homework right, and second of all he had, like, no idea how to socialise, except for all the time he'd spent socialising with Ladybug, and Ladybug wasn't exactly HERE AT THIS SCHOOL RIGHT NOW IMMEDIATELY, was she? So he doubted those skills would be particularly useful.

Besides. He _had _been the poster boy. The sick child all of Paris knew about.

Some of his classmates wouldn't touch him with a ten foot pole. Too afraid of 'catching' something, or breaking him somehow, or maybe they were just afraid to be dragged into the flurry of media attention his enrolment had drawn - was still drawing. Cameras followed him to school, each and every single day. (Adrien insisted on walking. He had a bodyguard his father had assigned him - those stitches still weren't out yet, and who knows what would happen if he tore them - but he insisted on walking. He _could _walk, now. All the way. He loved it.)

Ladybug hadn't answered his text, yet, but it had only been two days since he sent it, and he wouldn't have known what to say, either. Sometimes Ladybug freaked out and didn't know what to say, especially about this sort of thing. Sometimes she panicked and just … forgot that she hadn't answered. He wasn't that worried. She'd figure out what to say, eventually, and it would be perfect, because she was the one who said it. Adrien asked Plagg if anything had come in, though, and he dropped into his seat at his very-empty lunch table, hospital-approved meal in hand. He had to eat healthy if he wanted to give these lungs the best shot at settling in. Fortunately, he already did enough exercise. Not-so-fortunately, the steroids he was on to prevent rejection made him _constantly _hungry, and his nutritious, wonderful meal did very little to fill his grumbling stomach. He'd have to talk to his nurse the next time he even _had _a nurse - his previous one, hired by his father, had quit when things had looked grim, so at the moment he was flying nurse-free.

Lung-good, nurse-free, laughter-capable, for the first time in years. He was maybe a touch nervous.

Adrien gave up trying to eat his lunch at this lunch table. He'd spent enough of his life indoors - there were people staring - he packed it up, and he hitched his bag onto his shoulder, and he went out into the school grounds so that he might find a place which felt like sunshine, with maybe some patch of grass to lie in. Instead, he found a girl. She was sitting by herself. Her hands were idly playing with the same grass Adrien had wanted to lay about in, making little chains; she took one strand, and split it in two, just at the middle, so she could weave the next piece in.

It had seemed so overwhelming, to go and speak to any one of the dozens of other kids in the cafeteria, but here they were outside, and the day was warm, and he loved this air, and Adrien wasn't very scared of her at all. He thought she was very pretty.

"Hey," he said, "do you mind if I join you?"

The girl didn't look up at him, but she nodded her permission, as absently as her hands were moving, so Adrien settled in the grass and started in on the meal his nutritionist had recommended for him. Early weeks after the transplant, he had to follow this schedule to the hour - which was good, because he had been trained to follow schedules almost his entire life, so this one wasn't very hard to follow. In between mouthfuls, and speared salad, Adrien said, "My name's Adrien. What's yours?"

The girl said, "Marinette."

She wasn't eating anything. Adrien was caught out, watching her, because she peeked up at him, now, and he was still looking at her, wondering what she could possibly be thinking. Why wasn't she inside, with her friends?

Adrien said, "Why don't you tell me about it? I'm pretty new to school, but I've been told I'm a pretty good listener." All the seniors had loved him, at the hospital. For a while. Adrien plucked out one blade of grass, and he started his own little chain.

Marinette found out that he _was _a good listener, because they sat in silence for a little while, while she made her thoughts make sense in her head, and he didn't seem to mind the wait. Was that what people who needed lung transplants were like? Did they just not mind the wait, because they were - up until recently - always waiting? No, that sounded too morbid. But maybe? Ugh.

Ugh.

She didn't know what to say to Chat Noir, or how to help him, now. She didn't like that he'd had the surgery without telling her - that was a big thing, and she knew he _would _have told her, if he'd had a chance, so how close had it gotten? How close, and she hadn't known? - and now she didn't know what to say, or do. What if she said the wrong thing? The last thing he needed was someone saying the wrong thing, NOW.

She looked up, again, to peek at Adrien Agreste, who this time had the good manners to pretend he didn't see her peeking. She couldn't ask anybody else what to do. They all knew she had 'my friend, the Guy, who means I can't date anybody else, but also I'm not dating him', and that was as much as they DID know, and if she started mentioning things about Chat Noir's life willy-nilly - like the fact he had needed a lung transplant, in the first place - then what was the point of their secret identities, to begin with?! But she could ask Adrien Agreste. They weren't friends, yet. And he was a good listener, he said.

And she trusted him. With no real reason to, except the way he sat there, patiently, and waited, and made his chain of grass, in the sun, she trusted him.

So Marinette asked, "What do you say to someone who just had a transplant?"

Adrien didn't look up. He asked, "What do you mean?" because it sounded like she had something else she was asking, but she hadn't gotten around to it yet. He kept his voice neutral. He had expected a lot of questions, like this.

"I have… well, he isn't … someone I know had one, recently. I think in the past couple of months. And I don't want -" she only stumbled for a second, "to hurt him. I don't want to hurt him. Are you meant to say congratulations? Or is that insensitive, because of the donor? Or do you not talk about them? Or -?"

Adrien smiled, and it was affectionate, in a way that didn't quite belong to this girl, sitting across from him. Marinette. She just made him think of Ladybug, a little; when she got going she just sort of … kept going. He loved that about her. (He loved a lot of things about Ladybug.) The fondness of his smile stopped her in her tracks, though, and Marinette blushed (also very pretty, like Ladybug), so Adrien dropped the grass chain and lay down in the grass, as had long been his plan. He loved to soak up the sun. "I don't know," he said.

Marinette thought, well, that wasn't very helpful.

Adrien continued, "I guess you don't say congratulations to the donors, but… I mean, I really want to talk about that stuff. This family doesn't want to hear from me at all, it's like … passing trains. The hospital says I can write a letter, and they'll deliver it, but they've made it pretty clear they won't be opening it. I don't even know what I would say."

"Thank you?"

"For their dead daughter?" it seemed a little cruel. He had thought to thank them, too, and he would have liked to, but he couldn't think of a way to do it that didn't make an already hard time worse for them. Adrien lifted an arm up, to cover his eyes.

Marinette asked, next, in a bare whisper, "Does it hurt?" because his shirt had lifted up, a little bit, and she could have followed that trail of hair in either direction, but she followed it up to the marrish scar which was developing down the very centre of his chest. She could see just the tail end of it, from where she sat. Adrien lifted it up just a little bit further, so she could see how it crept all the way across his ribcage. It wasn't the only scar, there. He'd had more surgeries on his lungs than he could count.

"It's not too bad. It's better than not having them, that's for sure." Only his voice wavered, a bit, toward the end there, and Adrien had to strain to breathe past something which leapt into his throat, because he had as yet not gone back to the hospital bed, or what he had thought, or the belief that he was dying, and he really didn't want to. He could live the rest of his life without thinking about how that had felt, ever again.

She watched him hang onto his composure, just. Marinette swallowed something of her own.

Had Chat been that close?

Had Chat been so close that he could be afraid, like that, just talking about it?

Chat Noir wasn't afraid of anything.

"I think you're really brave, Adrien. Coming out here and doing this."

"Doing what?"

"Talking about it." She smiled, for him. This was one of her favourite parts of her job, as Ladybug; Paris' superheroes weren't just about stopping akumatised victims, they were about stopping people being akumatised. Being Ladybug had, factually, made Marinette a better, kinder person, and she was constantly learning. Usually she learnt from Chat, never mind that he learnt just as much from her. Marinette lay down beside Adrien in the grass, and the action might have been strange, for two people who did not yet count as friends, but it didn't feel that way.

"So what now?" Adrien asked her. Because nobody had been there to ask, before, and he didn't know. He had never had a whole-rest-of-his-life to plan for, before.

"Do you want to be friends?" Marinette offered.

"Yeah." His eyes slid sideways, to peer at her, "If you haven't filled your lung-transplant-recipient quota."

Marinette thought, privately, that this was an awful thing to say, but she gave him the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes Chat Noir had been like that, early on - she'd figured out it was just because he'd never really socialised. Maybe Adrien had never really socialised. She said, "My friends and I do game night tonight. It's every Wednesday. Are you going to be free? I did some research, I know there's a LOT of stuff to do for recovery…"

"I can make it." If he couldn't, he would bring his things with him. Adrien was excited. There was a spark in him that made Marinette smile. "I haven't been to a game night since I was nine. That would be really cool, Marinette, thanks for inviting me! Should I bring anything?"

"Just yourself is fine, Adrien." She was warm.

Adrien settled, because of the warmth of her voice, and the way it tasted like honey, on the air.

He confessed, very quietly, "I really like my laughter," which made Marinette burst INTO laughter, and Adrien found out that he really liked hers, too.

"_What_?"

He grinned, sheepish - "I haven't really laughed since my voice broke, I was - I mean, I don't know about your friend. But my lungs weren't really good enough to. I sat in the courtyard and laughed for like an hour, I must have looked insane." But anyway, the only reason he brought it up - "There aren't a lot of people who knew me before the surgery," he said, "for you it's just my laugh, now. But if you knew him, you should listen for it. I bet he loves it, too."

The lunch bell rang.

Neither one of them really made to move.

* * *

A/N: And heeeeere I am with some extra bit of the fic on the same night because it was still stuck in my head and no work in the morning! Wooooo! I am going to bed lol I am too old for this. Also, did people migrate to Ao3? Is that something that happened in the fic community and I didn't notice? I have not written fanfics in a looooong time.


	3. Dear Donor Family

_Dear Donor Family ID#59293. _

That wasn't a good start. Adrien drew a line through it. They had given him a false name to write to, because he needed to start the letter SOMEhow, but he didn't know what to say. Honestly, he didn't think that it was _his _to say - the thank you. It was a very idealistic thing to think, so he didn't know if it was, like, just himself being Typical Angsty Chat Noir, but it felt really strange to be writing to this family when they were missing such a whole big part of theirs. It wasn't his thank you to give. He would have liked his father to write this letter, or better, his mum - he would have liked someone who loved him and knew him to write it. Because if there were someone who loved him, someone who would know what it was like to be afraid of losing that whole part of their family - if there was someone who _had _been afraid, in the same way this family must have been… and they had still had him? And they could _write _about that?

It seemed more fitting that someone who loved him took up the only letter that Adrien got to send, at all. He was limited to one A4 page, 12pt font, no more, no less. That gave him about 500 words. He was writing it by hand because it was impersonal to type.

If someone who loved him got to write this letter, then the family would know that their daughter's lungs went somewhere where they were loved, and they gave life to someone who was wanted, and they had spared some family the heartache of grief and worry and nights-spent-up sick, and…

Well, he sat on top of the tower, because his father had still not been home since the transplant, and Nathalie had only come to drop off another set of clothes for a shoot, and the only person he could think of in the whole wide world who might have any qualification to write about loving him was Ladybug. Not romantic love, but she cared. Definitely. He believed that.

They were meant to be meeting today, anyway. She'd texted back a little while ago - she'd said, _I want to see you_, which he'd read as an _I love you_, and he'd told her to meet him at the top of the tower. He was looking out over the city. Paris was beautiful.

Paris - his city - she was amazing. And she shone, at night, and the cars crept along the roads like blood through veins, and here some family arrived home, laughing, and a child swung on that swingset in the playground down below and just for a second it looked like he was flying, soaring across the tanbark, free in the low halo of light that warmed the metal bones of the swings and the monkeybars. Paris was alive, below him, sprawled out and intimate and mysterious, at once, and he loved her. It always took his breath away, this view. He had missed it.

The paper fluttered in his hand - it was windy up here, no buildings to block out the rush of air as it leapt across the city - and he looked down at it, again, the piece of paper torn from his notebook, with _Dear Family ID _scrawled across the top of it.

"Chat Noir," Ladybug said, behind him. She must have just landed. She was breathless. He stood up, and turned around, and there was some urgency to it - he didn't know what he wanted to say but she hadn't texted back and -

And she came into him, at once. At once, she was flat against him, and her arms caught up all of him that they could reach - her hands fisted in the leather of his suit -

He had thought that maybe she wouldn't know how close it had been, but he choked out, "LB," and there was no way she could have missed the shock of fright in him. The sliver of fear which eased out, now that he was being held by someone who loved him, and she was real and warm and he found her, again. There had been a day - several long hours - where he had believed he never would. Where he believed the last thing they'd have ever said to each other was, _I'll see you, Bugaboo, _and, _You're the worst, Chat Noir!_, and he had spent many of those hours worrying what those last words would do to her. Because Ladybug would remember them, and stress about them, and worry that he didn't know -

"Oh, Chaton," she worried, and she was coming down from something terrible that had frightened her, as well. Her hands released their grip on his suit so that they could explore more freely, now, and she must have done her research because her fingertips traced the entire length of the scar on his chest, from top to bottom, even beneath the suit. "Oh," she repeated, and hugged him again.

It was funny, because in as long as it had been since he'd had the transplant, Adrien had never once thought to cry, and now Ladybug had him in her arms and the tears sprang into his eyes and something hard to swallow leapt into his throat, and…

"Chaton, you can never do that again, you have to tell me. I would have brought you. We promised." She was so angry, and scared, and wanting, because he had promised her he would tell her, and she hated that he had not been here, on this tower where they'd…

Chat Noir cried. With very little reservation, in great heaving sobs he had never been capable of before the transplant - Ladybug had been warned to listen for Chat Noir's laughter and what she got instead was the ache in him as he cried out all of the fear and loneliness and how much he had wanted her, and he cried like he hadn't since his mum had died, and it was awful. Chat Noir had cried on her shoulder, before, but never like this. She did not know what to do with him, so she patted his hair, and trailed her fingers down his arms, and stayed. One day, years ago, she had asked if there was anything she could do for him - you know, about the… about how sick he was - and he had said, "Stay," like nobody had thought to try it before.

So she stayed, while he cried, and she hoped that he appreciated it. (He cried harder, because of it.)

Honestly, really, neither one of them was really prone to tears, but even Ladybug's eyes were wet when Chat Noir had finally finished, and her voice was hoarse when she whispered, "This city, huh?"

Chat laughed. It was breathless, and not the laughter he had promised, because he'd just finished crying so his voice was all snotty and thick with tears and his breath still shook - but he laughed, and sniffed, and came away so that he could cross his arm past hers, over the railing. Their arms formed an X. They stood, shoulder to shoulder. She was right: he loved this view. That had been one of the very first things he'd said to her, how beautiful this city was, from up at the top of the Eiffel Tower. It was grounding, for him.

He breathed, and caught his breath, and Paris kept right on living, below them, indifferent to his breakdown, or how lost Ladybug sometimes felt, not knowing what to do with him.

Silence, for a while.

Marinette ventured, "I made a new friend, who had a transplant, and he says -"

Chat said, "I love you."

It was entirely by mistake. He didn't mean to say it out loud. It had just been sitting in his head, you know, for so long, and then here he was with a new set of lungs, and all of Paris beneath him, and Ladybug shoulder-to-shoulder, his partner, and his teammate, and _**his**_, and there wasn't any reason to hide it from her anymore. He was in love with her. Everything she did was just … the most incredible… she was amazing. She was just amazing, and kind, and brilliant, and everything. Ladybug was everything.

He did not know if she understood what he meant. He didn't know if she understood that it was _more than friends, _or if she thought he was saying it generally, like one might say to a family member. He didn't know. Later, he would have to ask her. For now, Ladybug removed her hand - the one crossing past his - from the railing, and offered it to him, palm-up. He took it. She laced her fingers through his.

"Sometimes," she said, "I felt so scared I couldn't breathe, Chat Noir. And it felt stupid." Because he had been the one who couldn't breathe, she couldn't just Steal His Thing, but really she had been so frightened for him, and she hadn't been able to talk about it because how do you even TALK about something like that?

Chat Noir peered over at her.

She peered very shyly back at him, because it STILL felt stupid.

Chat Noir threw his head back, and laughed, with real tears of mirth, and Ladybug shoved him, "Chat _Noir_!" (play nice!), and he laughed more, and freely, and against the lights of Paris, he was beautiful. Against the lights of the city he was in love with, up here on this tower where he breathed real lungfuls of air, and he ducked away from her when she shoved him, and he was beautiful and alive and his hair was messy because two seconds ago he'd been sobbing, and she'd been running her hands through it -

Here, where he laughed, he was beautiful. Ladybug had never considered anything of her partner before - he was sick, it wouldn't have been fair to think he might even be _possibly _wasting time on something as silly as a teenage romance. It hadn't even crossed her mind, and up until now, here, tonight, while he was laughing, it still hadn't. But here, she felt the stirrings of something fluttery and warm in her chest, because she was so happy for him, so happy that _he _was happy, and still alive, and hers. And it really took her breath away, which made her laugh, too, because that really still was sort of _his _thing.

* * *

_Dear Family Verdun, _

This was the fake name that they had been handed, for this letter.

_I am writing as the partner of one of your daughter's donation recipients. He can breathe whole lungfuls of air now, and when he laughs it makes me want to cry, because he doesn't choke on it. He just laughs. And it's beautiful, you should see him. _

_My partner asked me to write this letter because he thought that anything that might help you would come from someone who loved him. That's the sort of person that he is. That's who you've kept in this world because you made a hard decision, and one that means he gets to laugh, still, when there was a time we thought we would never reach each other again. I don't want to be crass, or to say thank you for something that was so terrible, because it feels like the wrong thing to say. All of this letter feels like the wrong thing to say. _

_But we - both of us - are so happy. He sat here next to me laughing about making plans for the rest of his life, tonight, because suddenly he has one. A rest of his life. That's what you gave to him. _

_The person your daughter saved is very loved, and I am sorry that these two never got to meet, because I am certain that she would have liked him. He's impossible to not like. _

_Please, if you are ever worried about the choice your daughter made, think about him laughing. Because he is only seventeen, and he is beautiful, and I had never heard him laugh like he could breathe before. She was very brave. We have tremendous respect for her, and I promise we will make sure we honour her memory with every breath her lungs take. _

_Thank you. For whatever it means, and if it means anything: thank you. _

_\- L.D.B._

* * *

**A/N:** Whahey! Become an organ donor today, it's worth the effort of signing onto the donor list & having a chat with your family about it.

But hey guys! Good to be back. I am just getting started on doing the research for my honours dissertation (which is almost 20k words I need to write!), so this maaaaay have been a bad time to start a fic, but here we are! These two are so cute together. I'm going to have to find a way to keep them a bit further apart; I forgot that Adrien has a terrible tendency to blurt how much he is in love with this girl whenever he thinks of it. Darn troublesome kid.

Leave a review if you're interested in me continuing - it definitely helps me get a shift on!


	4. Lonely

This boy, Marinette thought, was in the same position that Chat Noir was.

It was nice, to have that sort of insight. She liked it. Adrien was a nice person, sure, and she liked him for who he was, absolutely - but she watched him a little too long, sometimes, when he leant into the people around him. He came alive with the people around him, straightened right up when Nino spoke to him or Alya pushed him away with her foot, annoyed he had won this last game - Adrien Agreste was touch-starved and loved that these three were not afraid of him, of being with him. More often than she didn't, Marinette found herself in the corner of the couch on game night, patting Adrien's hair as he made himself comfortable against her, beneath the blankets that her mum came to heap on them when she realised the night was winding down, and they were tired.

More often than not, Marinette found herself reaching to answer him, because on some base level she recognised that. What a coincidence; Adrien had the exact same streak of lonely in him. Was this why Chat tried so hard - were his circumstances like Adrien's, was this the sort of thing that made him grab at her, like he had, that night, when she'd hugged him and wanted him and he'd cried like nobody had celebrated with him, before that?

Marinette wasn't a selfish girl. She was less selfish than she had been when she was young, at the very least - Chat had taught her a lot. Her heart ached for Adrien, and all of the things that he had been missing in his life up until he had been able to come to a public school. But she wondered, idly, sometimes, about Chat Noir - thought to compare these two boys with their new lungs and shared laughter, which tasted like windchimes - and she was doing it, now, cuddled in the cushy corner. Adrien's breaths were slow and even. He was smiling. Marinette combed her fingers through his hair, still, and wondered if it was her place to ask any of this, at all. Adrien had come to a few game nights, now. He was still busy in the week - being an international top model came with a full schedule - but he made time for this, and school, and he always seemed happiest when he could just… _be _there, with people. What did she even want to ask?

What she wanted was to know why he deflated, every time he checked his phone, like he was in some perpetual state of waiting on a call from someone who just sent texts about what photoshoot he had scheduled next week, instead.

"Adrien?"

"Mmm?" he was very content to fall asleep on her. It didn't occur to either of them that this was strange - their bodies knew each other, if they themselves did not.

"Why…" how could she put it, really? _Why are you so sad? _"We all really like having you here, Adrien."

He breathed. Chat did this, too; she didn't have to ask, to know, because she had asked Chat, before. Sometimes, he just liked to breathe, and focus on that feeling, whatever it was, which undid something in his chest, and filled him up, and made him happy. Marinette did not stop patting his hair. She waited for him to almost finish this, this _feeling _that he did (where that's what he did - he just deliberately _felt_), and then she added, "I really mean it," because it made her smile, to watch him hide his smile into her shoulder. He swallowed the whine of complaint, but she heard it, anyway: how could she do this to him? She couldn't keep being this nice, he was going to explode.

"You had someone, before us, right? You weren't alone?" that's what she wanted to know. Marinette wanted to know that it wasn't just… that she hadn't missed anything.

Adrien hummed. He pulled away from her, now, and she felt the loss of him, but Adrien stretched out with his head at the other end of the couch. He took the blankets with him. She only realised, belatedly, that she should have been holding onto them, if she wanted to keep them.

He breathed, for a while longer (she knew what it was like to listen to Chat breathing, now, so she listened to Adrien's easy breaths with something of the same awe), until Adrien said, "My father never wanted to be involved, really. But I have a girl."

"A girl?"

He was sleepy. He yawned, and stretched out like a cat, and pulled the blanket up so that he could use it a little bit like a pillow, only the rest of it was still draped over him, diagonal. "She's the best."

"The magazines never said…" it seemed like such a silly complaint. Marinette had read the magazines, yes, but they had not shown her this side of Adrien Agreste, so what could they have told her about his love life?

"She doesn't want people to know." This was true enough. Adrien rubbed at one of his eyes. Sleepy. She could hear his thick swallow, only it sort of stuck something in his throat - it must have - because when he spoke again, it was with some sleepy catch which, in the future, she would learn was one of her absolute favourite kinds of Adrien Agreste's voice. For now, she just felt something tight and warm flip over in her stomach, because of it, and she pulled her legs up onto the couch with her, so she could sit in a little ball, listening. Adrien continued, "She's everything, though."

Marinette wondered what it must have been like, to be loved in that way. To be loved by someone who spoke about you like that, who had obviously given up trying to find words, who knew that there was nothing they could say to even come close to all of the things they _wanted _to.

She said, "Oh," because she had not known that Adrien Agreste _did _love somebody, in that way.

"I wouldn't be here without her." His breaths were getting slower. More even. He was drifting off.

Marinette thought about Chat Noir. He'd said similar things, before. She wondered about it. Them. "You would. _You're _the one who beat it, Adrien." His girl had had very little to do with it.

"Maybe," Adrien whispered back, tiredly - "but I don't think I would have bothered."

Marinette felt very small.

By the time she had thought of something else to say, Adrien had already drifted off, content to be lost in the little snippets of Ladybug he could draw into his mind's eye: her smile. The way she flicked her hair back when she had a razor-sharp pun to shoot at him. The _catch-me-if-you-can,_ _kitty! _Attitude he was so in love with.

* * *

Marinette rapped several times on the mansion's front doors.

There had been a gate. She had ignored it, because the lady _working _the gate over the intercom hadn't seen fit to let her in. Honestly - if they didn't want people climbing it, they shouldn't have been so stingy with who they let open it.

Her knock echoed all the way into the very depths of Agreste Manor, which - she would discover, soon - was as hollowed out and empty as either Adrien or Chat were, on a bad day.

She didn't know what she was doing here. She knew her idol, Gabriel Agreste, was back in Paris, at last. She knew that he was in the manor because she'd seen the reports of it. She also knew that Adrien had been scheduled for a photoshoot in Giverny this weekend, which just so happened to conveniently align with Gabriel's time here, and she just - what was she going to say to him? _Be a better father? _Surely, Gabriel was trying.

Surely, because parents couldn't be so bad as to be - to be _wrong_, like that, surely he was trying. She was just going to … tell him how to try better. That was her job, as Ladybug. She was here because her job, as Ladybug, Paris' superhero, was to help people to live happier, healthier, better lives, and neither one of the Agrestes could be happy about how they lived with each other, could they?

Marinette sort of had an entire speech prepared.

Then the door opened, and it wasn't Gabriel Agreste (thank goodness - she might have lost her determination altogether), it was Nathalie - Gabriel's assistant. "Yes?" she asked, snappy.

Marinette blinked at her. She had her school bag with her, clutched tight in both hands, the worn leather feeling extraordinarily out of place, already. As empty as this building was, it screamed of luxury. It could have been a warm, inviting home, if there had been any life in it. Marinette could see the sweeping staircase, past this woman, and the chandelier - she could imagine people making something of this empty house. But at the moment, it was a house. Maybe even a mansion. It was not a home.

That was everything Marinette was processing, so she said, "Iiiiieeeeeeeee," accidentally, and then she shoved the bag forward, into Nathalie's stomach, because Nathalie did not see fit to retrieve it from her - "I'm a friend! One of Adrien's. Friends, that is. I wanted to talk - speak - no," she snatched the bag back, because Nathalie had reached for it, "I'd like to speak to Monsieur Agreste I mean I'm really a huge fan and you're Nathalie! We've spoken on the phone, I brought the homework?"

All of this, in her head, sort of made sense, put together. Ish.

Nathalie frowned at her, but Marinette did not turn the 'homework' in her little leather bag over, so Nathalie stepped aside to allow her entry. "Monsieur Agreste doesn't take guests. You may leave Adrien's homework with a member of the staff. Someone will be along shortly. Please wait here."

"I want to talk to him about the surgery," Marinette said. She was very upfront with it, because - again, surely - surely - this woman, who had known Adrien for as long as his father had, would have thought about fixing that relationship, before.

"If you would like to arrange an interview time with Adrien, you will have to -"

"No," Marinette said, "no, I mean - Monsieur Agreste. I know he's here. It will only take a minute, but he has to want to learn about how his son is now, right? It's been months. Adrien says he hasn't visited, once, in years -"

"And why do you think that is, Ms Dupain-Cheng?"

"Because he's scared." The implication was that Gabriel did not care, but Marinette just didn't believe it. Flat-out, and with that same stubborn nature that had made Chat Noir fall for her, she did not believe that somebody could think like that about their own son. "Adrien is doing well. He should see him - I have videos of him laughing, M. Agreste would want to see -"

"You have taken unauthorised footage of my son?"

Gabriel stood at the head of the stairs. He looked down at the pair of them, the two ladies in the doorway of the mansion, until Nathalie stepped aside to greet her employer appropriately and Marinette used it as an excuse to slip over the threshold, and push the door shut behind her. "M. Agreste, I understand you're afraid because of what happened to your wife, but Adrien -"

"'What happened to my wife' was her _death_, Miss…?"

"Ms Dupain-Cheng is a friend of Adrien's, from school," Nathalie provided.

"I did take footage of him, M. Agreste, I have it here." Marinette moved up the stairs, phone in her hand - "Please," she said, "he's beautiful."

Gabriel raised a brow, because to him this was hardly new information, but he leaned over the girl's shoulder so that he might peer at her phone screen. Of course he knew what his son looked like; Gabriel received all the latest from the photoshoots, so that he might pick and choose which to include in the next edition of the magazine. The footage wasn't anything special. One of the other students caught him around the shoulders, and said somethingsomethingsomething DUDE which the camera didn't quite catch, and then Adrien laughed. The way the sun caught him was pretty, Gabriel supposed, but the footage did not mean anything special to him.

Marinette realised, with some sinking feeling, that Adrien had been telling the truth: nobody really knew him before the surgery. His father did not have any reason to notice the difference that Marinette had assumed he would - she'd assumed it would be as real and sudden as when she had first heard Chat laugh. She'd assumed…

"Ms Dupain-Cheng, what are you doing here?"

"Your son misses you," she challenged.

"I will take the commentary of a seventeen-year-old highschool student who has climbed my gates and barged into my home with all the respect due to it. Nathalie," Gabriel inclined his head, and Marinette felt the cool night air behind her: Nathalie had opened the door again.

"The exit is this way, Ms Dupain-Cheng."

"But he's your son," Marinette argued. Emptily. Because that should have been enough to conquer all of that - it should not have mattered how she'd gotten here to _tell _him that, he should have just … just wanted…

"And you are unwelcome on these premises. I do not solicit parenting advice from teenagers."

Marinette went home that night with the new-found knowledge that you should _never _meet your idols.


	5. Father and Farther Away

It must have been hard, to be his father. That's what Adrien had put it - all of it - down to. Gabriel Agreste had first watched his wife suffer, and plead for Adrien's life (he needed lungs - could he not have hers? She would give him anything; everything), and still she had died three spaces short of even being the top of the donor list. Of course he had not wanted to watch that happen, over, with his son. Adrien had been diagnosed very young - Gabriel had insisted on the testing, once it became clear that this disease could claim lives - and after that, after Emilie's death, Adrien had seen less and less of his father. Adrien just was not vindictive enough to blame him. Adrien didn't love like that. Like they had to do something to earn it.

Gabriel could pull away as hard as he liked. Adrien knew what it was like to feel three-quarters of a whole person, to feel like he would otherwise be good enough to love _**but**_, and he simply was not vindictive enough to wish that on anybody else. Especially the people who he loved.

Still, once he'd received this new pair of lungs, he had thought…

Well, he'd believed…

And then his father had arranged for Adrien to be out of the city at the same time he, Gabriel, was going to be in Paris, and it was exactly as normal, two passing ships whose lights were dimmed and whose sailors were stowed away in the barracks, silent, eyes closed, unwilling to see that there was anything in this ocean besides… besides the waves. It was hardly anything new - this was how it had always worked - but there was still that pang, you know, because he had thought this was just a business trip. Like, nobody had ever told him with banners flying and horns blaring, HE'S AVOIDING SEEING YOU SO YOU NEED TO LEAVE PARIS FOR A WHILE, and so of course he had not been warned in the same way this time, but it was a bit of a shock. What was it now?

What was it now, now that he was not only three-quarters-good-enough - what was it now that he had borrowed a whole quarter of a person in the form of a set of lungs from a teenage girl whose family was so bereft they could not bear to speak to him? Surely, there couldn't be anything else. Adrien had thought, maybe foolishly, that there could not be anything else. He had thought, maybe foolishly, that understanding how _hard _it was to be his father was something he would only have to do up until he survived, or he didn't, and now he had crossed that point and suddenly his father just still didn't… want him.

And if he was not _otherwise good enough to love __**BUT**_, then…

"More tea, Mr Agreste?"

Adrien looked up. There was a server - he was in London, now, at some upscale cafe. They did tea and scones, here. Adrien liked scones. He closed the magazine, which was probably healthy for him, honestly. He'd been staring at the photos of his father opening some building in the middle of Paris. Adrien didn't know if his father looked genuinely happy or if he looked happy for the cameras - Adrien had lived long enough as a model to know that there was a difference, but goodness, he did not know his father well enough to tell which smile was which. "Yes, thank you." He managed his own camera-smile, now, and the server poured his tea.

Adrien was already sipping at it when he realised that the server was not actually _going, _yet. Having Adrien's attention seemed to make the poor bloke nervous - the man was fidgeting with his cufflinks. Probably not a very good match for an upscale cafe like this one, which was trying its best to scream of formality, but Adrien rather liked it, actually. He had always liked the touches of humanity that bled (literally, bled - these slip ups were treated as wounds, things to be fixed) out of overly formalised places. If you prick us, do we not bleed?

The server apologised, "I'm sorry, sir," and retrieved the teapot from Adrien's table so that he could -

"No," Adrien was only enjoying the sunshine, out here. In the flowers. He put a hand out to stop the poor guy, "it's really fine, I could use the conversation! What did you want to say?"

The server - his name was Benjamin, said his nametag, which was a very English name - hesitated. He said, "Just congratulations, sir," and Adrien would, for the rest of his life, wonder why his first thought was not _thank you_. The very first thing that leapt into his head was, _my father hasn't said that, _and he considered it a flaw in his character. Benjamin was being nice.

"Thanks," Adrien said, politely. "You guys are doing a really great job, here. Would you mind taking a selfie with me? I'd like to remember my favourite server."

Benjamin just about dropped the teapot. He had been fumbling over a way to ask. Adrien walked away from that cafe with a cute boy's phone number (a pity - he was in love with Ladybug) and more tea in him than there really ought to be, because he had not left untl he'd absolutely had to. Why rush, when there were corners of the world where he could breathe, and he had found one of them?

He left the cafe late (latte? He missed Ladybug, when he traveled; she would have appreciated his puns, or at least she would have tolerated them), so that he could get to the airport in time to catch his flight. This wasn't very difficult, because it was a private jet, and the pilot was waiting on his arrival. This entire trip had been a waste of time. He hadn't achieved anything. All that had happened was that he was out of Paris while his father was _in _Paris. That was it.

What a surprise.

* * *

Adrien was texting Nino when he got home. He pushed the door inward with his backpack and walked in, backwards - he was a billionaire top model celebrity, but that didn't mean he had to take a lot of stuff with him when he travelled. Adrien liked to travel light. Besides, with all of the different germs and whatnot that were overseas, he wanted to give these lungs a break from all the literal heavy-lifting.

He threw his keys in the dish by the door and plopped his bag down (it jangled) so that he could work on pulling off his overcoat, which was alright for England's miserable weather but a bit much on a warm spring day in Paris. Nino texted something about the next bit of homework. Did Adrien know the answer to question 8 on their take-home maths exam? This was, genuinely, something that could have taken Adrien's breath away because of the sheer _normal_cy of it (he got to be a normal kid!), but he had only just gotten back from international travel and a run-in with customs because, he suspected, that customs officer had wanted his autograph, so the novelty of being normal was somewhat lost to him. He would work on being breath-taken when he was not exhauuuuuuuu-

Hold on a minute.

Adrien paused on his way out of the kitchen (he'd only just grabbed an apple) because he'd heard the clink of the _good _glassware being dropped, too hard, against the wood of the stretching table in the dining hall, the next room over. The door was cracked. In any other circumstance, he would have considered this good cause to call the police and let them deal with the intruder. In this circumstance, he was secretly Chat Noir, on the sly, and he was as fit as he had ever been because his new lungs demanded a regimen that he was more than happy to subscribe to, and so he went to peer through the gap into the dining room. There was a fire in the hearth, throwing its light against the walls. The silhouette of a man, sitting slumped.

Adrien stood and stared in silence, for a while, and then his phone chimed. Nino wanted to know, _what about questions 1-7? _

The silhouette sat up - whipped around, in the direction of the door.

Adrien pushed it open, so he could ask, "Father?" in a tone he hoped did not sound strangled.

The fire was burning, but it was dark. The curtains all along the windows were drawn closed, which they shouldn't have been, because Adrien never liked to close out the outside. The chandelier was not lit. Gabriel Agreste sat hunched at the head of the table - Adrien could see the twinkling glass that his father had put down; it wasn't being used. Gabriel just drank from the bottle. It was easier.

Silence stretched for so long it felt like forever.

Adrien had never seen this before. For the record, he had never known that his father drank, let alone excessively. He did not know what to do with a drunk man who looked at him like he, Adrien, Gabriel's son, was a stranger. He did not know what to do with that livid, wild, frightening look in Gabriel's bloodshot eyes, or the stench of alcohol which filled the too-warm, humid room. What was Gabriel even doing here? He should have left by now. Adrien had his father and suddenly he wasn't sure what to do with him, and that twisted something awful in his stomach, as well, because he had just spent the entire trip back worrying that he did _not _have Gabriel, and here he was. Here he was, and Adrien rather wished he had not opened this door at all, and not found him, and…

But that was a very selfish thing to think, and he was his mother's child. Adrien said, "Father, come to bed. You're drunk," and he stepped forward to collect the glass from its place at the very edge of the table, where it was waiting to be knocked off.

The bloodshot eyes followed his movements.

Gabriel opened his mouth, and mouthed something, empty, breathless for a little while - his voice was gone, maybe because of the whiskey (it was strong stuff) - but then he asked, "Adrien?" as though he did not recognise his son.

Adrien would not have blamed him for that, either, and it had nothing to do with how vindictive he was - it was just realistic. They had not stood together, like this, in years. It felt like eons. The last time Adrien had seen his father, face to face - been able to reach out and _touch _him like this - he had been so young, and things had only just gotten Really Bad, and Gabriel had said that things were going to be okay. He had said it emptily, emotionlessly, like he did not believe a word that was coming out of his mouth. But Gabriel-his-father had said it, and Adrien had wanted to believe him, and he had held onto his father for these three, almost four years, because of it.

The man in front of him used Adrien's arms to stand, now - caught onto his elbows and clawed his way up, dizzy on his feet, too drunk to see straight. "Father," Adrien repeated, and he lost track of what he wanted to say because of how Gabriel looked at him. They were standing very close. The bottle of whiskey had tumbled over, and was spilling out across the fine oak table; the glass Adrien had picked up was still in his hand.

There was something glazed over in Gabriel's eyes, but his vision shifted, down the length of Adrien's cheek and then up, again, it snapped up to his eyes. They stared at each other. Gabriel said, "Adrien," a second time, and his hands came up, now. Adrien did not know if he was being held as a father might hold a son - it had never happened before - but Gabriel reached up and he caught at the back of Adrien's neck, and the side of his face, and he pulled his son in, closer, with some quiet, "My son," which sounded thick and close to tears. The hug (it was a hug, he realised) cam out of nowhere, but it was so desperate, like a child clinging to the only thing solid in a spinning room, desperate to find a hold in the fabric of his shirt - his hair ("Like your mother's," Gabriel mouthed, more than said), and oh, it was underwhelming. Adrien had imagined this reunion, this acceptance of his father, he had imagined being _wanted_, and he had not imagined it in a room full to the brim with alcohol fumes and the smoke and warmth of a crackling fire; he had not imagined it past midnight, with whiskey across the table and the kitchen door open behind them, the kettle boiling away; he had not imagined that he would be holding an apple in one hand and a whiskey glass in the other, and that he would have to hug his father back with these two things stuck in his grasp, because his fingers had turned to ice, frozen on this moment of time where Gabriel just -

"My son," Gabriel repeated, and he sobbed.

It came out of nowhere, really. Gabriel sobbed and curled into Adrien's chest - Adrien was a whole two inches taller than him, now - and Adrien found himself standing there, patting his father's hair in a move that was meant to be comforting. How much had Gabriel had to drink?

The bottle didn't spill all that much, really. It was almost empty. Adrien didn't keep any alcohol in the mansion. He had no need for it.

That bottle had to be new.

"You were waiting up for me," Adrien realised. The front porch light had been on. He'd thought it was a mistake.

Gabriel opened his mouth to say something else, except instead he was sick, there, down Adrien's front, and on his shoes, and then he lost his footing and fell into the same chair Adrien had just pulled him out of. He was still crying. Whimpering, as a child might. Adrien wasn't.

Adrien didn't know what he was feeling. He felt sad, mostly, for this shell of a man, drunk and lost and holding onto something that… some_one _who had not been his for years. Gabriel had left. Adrien loved him - he did not love like people owed him something - but he did not know how to cling onto his father and want, in the same way that he might have when Emelie had died. He did not know that same desperation. He had grown up being punished for it.

He was covered in his father's sick.

Nino wanted to know the answers to questions nine and ten. Adrien put his apple down, and the glass, and he took the whiskey bottle away, even though Gabriel reached vaguely after it. He spread something - a blanket, it was cushy, anyway - out on the table, which was about waist high, and he helped his father onto it. It would be an okay place to sleep, tonight. Better than trying to drag him through the house to his bedroom.

His father would need his blankets. Adrien knew Gabriel well enough to know _that_; they smelt, still, vaguely, of Emelie. He sprayed her perfume every night he came to sleep here, so that it would settle into the linen, semipermanently, and hold her scent. Adrien went to retrieve his father's blankets from his room.

This turned out to be a mistake.

Gabriel's door was cracked open, just as the kitchen door had been - Adrien realised, later, that it must have been because he had tried to slam the door, and this crack was the rebound. The room was turned upside down.

It was destroyed. Papers were crumpled - designs torn, or burned, it looked like, in that wastepaper basket. The curtains were yanked down from the windows and it looked as though Gabriel had tried to smash those, too, but the glass had held: bulletproof. Gabriel's own freak out about safety had saved him the effort of replacing them. His desk was overturned. Adrien did not know what to make of that, either, and he did not try. What he did was go to retrieve the blankets. They were still tucked neatly around the bed, the only piece of sanity in this chaos. He found the bottle of Emilie's perfume, lying sideways on her pillow. It was intact. As full as could be expected, all these years after her death.

He took the blankets, anyway. When he came to wrap his father in them Gabriel caught at his hands - his wrists - and it made him startle, which was saying something, because Adrien was Chat Noir. He jumped, though, and Gabriel's piercing gaze found him; the difference was astounding, the sudden piercing gaze of The Gabriel Agreste, not the drunkard father Adrien had stumbled across in the early hours of the morning; this was the man he knew as his father, with a gaze sharp enough to strike through him without words, to x-ray him down to the bones and see everything there was in him, and somehow decide that it was not enough.

Gabriel looked at him.

His father asked, with a trembling, angry voice - there was _anger_ \- he asked, "Why did it have to be you?"

Adrien didn't know if he made a sound or if he asked _what _or if he did absolutely nothing, frozen there, in the middle of tucking his own father into a table, with Gabriel's sick all down his front, and his new lungs aching in a way that felt as though they were trying to explode out of chest, in rebellion against being given to someone who wasn't even loved.

This, Adrien thought, must have been what it was like to find it hard to breathe, even when there was a set of lungs functioning, in his body. This must have been what it was like, because it felt awfully familiar.

Gabriel whispered (slurred, really, at this point), "Why couldn't it have been her?"

His fingers were wrapped tight around Adrien's collar, to yank him closer, but they softened their grip, now. Loosened. Gabriel repeated, "My son…" in some vague way that no longer called to something which yearned in Adrien Agreste; there was no yearning left. Right now, all he felt was sick. Adrien rushed to finish tucking his father in, and then he picked up his backpack, again, and he left.


	6. Family

[**TEXT**]: I'm downstairs, will you let me in?

Adrien didn't know what he was doing on the bakery's doorstep. It would have been better to rent a hotel room. Someone, somewhere, would let a seventeen year old international top model check into a hotel room - it wasn't like he didn't have the money. What was he doing here? His feet had brought him here. He stood, nerves turning in his stomach. It had started raining sometime in between when he'd left home and when he'd arrived here - he'd walked, because he did not want to disturb any of the staff and pull them out of bed on a freezing cold night so that they could deal with Adrien Agreste, with vomit all down his front, and in his shoes, and his hair wasn't even nice today because he'd not had a chance to _wash _it since before the flight home, and..

And what, it was alright to do that to Marinette? Marinette and her family? He'd known these guys for maybe a few months, tops. He shouldn't have been here. This was where his feet had walked him to, but he shouldn't have been here.

He stood under the little awning, anyway, and made the bargain with himself that he would just wait another minute, or so, and see if Marinette just happened to be awake in the wee hours of the morning. He wouldn't wake her up, but … well, he didn't know what he wanted, he just wanted something to be fixed in some way and in his experience, Marinette was very good at making things more tolerable. That first day at school he had not had any idea how he was ever going to introduce himself to anyone, and then there had been Marinette and it had been shockingly easy.

She made things shockingly easy, so…

(Really? Did he think that?)  
(He was _not _going to call Ladybug about this. It made him embarrassed just to think about it. What would Ladybug say? Probably _I told you so_, probably she would say of course his father… of course Chat wasn't…)  
(He didn't want to risk that, anyway.)

The rain had washed the worst of his father's sick away. Only the stink remained. And the stains. Adrien was going to catch a cold, out in this weather, and probably die. That would be fun.

The minute came and went.

He closed his eyes, and leant his forehead against the door. It was dry, ish, under this awning. It would have been very daring for him to try the handle, but he did, because what the hey - and it was locked. Unsurprisingly.

What was he going to do, break into a bare-acquaintance's house and hope for the best?

Adrien slid all the way down the door and cried. With trembling hands and proper tears and this unconquerable thing in his throat (and he choked on it, and there was panic in the way he coughed and spluttered: it wasn't supposed to be hard to breathe) and he was always so good about not crying, he could tame himself so well, he had had formal training since he was young -

Adrien Agreste wanted his parents. He had not had either of them in years. He cried for as long as there were still tears in his body, and he felt very stupid because why should this, of all things, be a breaking point? It wasn't like he had lost anything. It wasn't like his father had broken any promises. And he.. He didn't…

The door unlocked. Adrien heard the bell above the bakery's door jangle, and he did fall forward when the door pulled inward, but it still came as a surprise that there was somebody else awake at three in the morning. He fell into her - her ankles - and for an instant he thought maybe it was Marinette, and she was awake after all, but when this woman squatted down, pulling her nightgown more tightly around herself, it was Sabine Dupain-Cheng. Marinette's mother. Several long beats passed where he looked at her and she looked at him, this crumpled mess of a seventeen-year-old on her doorstep in the dead of night, and Adrien braced himself to be scolded for waking her up (they had work lives, the Dupain-Chengs; he was raised with better manners than that), except what was actually happening in this long beat of silence was that Sabine was deciding whether or not she wanted to hug him, when he was covered in vomit.

"Hi, Mrs Dupain-Cheng," Adrien said, in a tremulous voice, because it seemed polite.

Sabine did hug him. She drew him into her arms because somebody had refused to hug him, she could tell, and that must have been awful for him. "Oh," she sighed out her worry, for him - this was her daughter's friend, and yes he was all over the magazines, but what did she really know about Adrien Agreste? - "Come inside, sweetheart, you'll catch your death out here. I'll put on the tea - Tom's just about to be up to turn on the ovens, you've come just in time."

Instead of coming inside, Adrien cried some more, so Sabine went to fetch a blanket from the linen cupboard and she lured him inside, that way, wrapped up in a blanket that they would later have to wash (it was covered in whatever _that_ was). Adrien didn't know what it was that made Sabine do it, but she did, and he missed being held like this - as though by a mother - so very badly that he fell into her very easily, with none of the reluctance that maybe he ought to be feeling: yes, she could pat his hair. Yes, she could tut at him for getting himself so soaked through, won't he catch a cold? That won't do - and yes, she could hold him until his hands stopped shaking, except from the cold, and Mr Dupain-Cheng had darted past them to start the ovens and Marinette was still asleep, somewhere, all the way upstairs.

He'd come here for Marinette and she was still asleep, somewhere; this family just … just looked after him anyway. They didn't need a reason. It would have been awe inspiring, if he had not been sniffling about it.

The blanket was all soggy. He was being ridiculous. Since when was he surprised? Come off it - he wasn't surprised. He was disappointed.

Everybody knew that was worse.

"I've started the shower for you," Sabine told him, and Adrien felt some thrill of appreciation for this woman, who did not have to ask him what he wanted to do next. She made it so easy - she told him. It was so easy to do what he was told. "It's two floors up, and on the right - you'll hear it running. Now, I've set out a towel for you, and we'll see if Marinette's up by the time you get out - she'll have something warm in your size, goodness knows that girl is a designer! But otherwise you might have to make do with some of Tom's things, when he was younger. Is that okay?"

She was so… warm.

Adrien nodded. His voice was hoarse when he said, fingers numb on the blankets, "Thanks, Mrs Dupain-Cheng."

He went to have a shower, and he washed it all away.

* * *

For the past seventeen years of his life, Adrien had never once thought to leave home. Even if he had thought about it, how was he actually going to pull that sort of thing off? Before the transplant, the idea of leaving his father alone in this big empty mansion had been awful. Now, it seemed like the only reasonable decision left to him. Adrien hated the mansion. He hated the empty rooms and the way the hallways felt dead, the way the house had not been the same since his mother had died; he hated that it was where he had spent those weeks he'd been cooped up, sick, when the hospital sent him home like going home was a treat, not isolation. There were rooms, there, which he could fill with his medical equipment, but these days he was needing less and less of it. He could make do with less space.

"I'm going to move out," Chat Noir said aloud, to Ladybug.

She rolled more into him, tucked into his side on this rooftop - they were lying under the stars. It hadn't taken him very long, to realise he wanted Ladybug. She'd taken a while, to show up for her patrol, but now they were lying here and she was sleepy, patting his hair. Chat loved this sort of ... he loved these moments. He loved that they could just waste time, here, lying about under the stars, when before they'd always been - pardon - holding their breaths.

Anyway.

"Will that make you happy?" Ladybug asked him.

He kissed her hair, because if he did not he thought he might explode. She was the sort of person who asked what would make him happy. Did she have any idea how rare that was? How special?

Ladybug never had any clue how special she was to him. She didn't know that she was doing anything out of the ordinary.

"I have friends," his voice strained, a little - wobbled, "I asked them already. They're coming to help me pack on Sunday."

Ladybug pulled away from him, a little, to look.

He'd never been to school. He didn't have friends. She knew that, about him - she'd said in the past that it was a pity, that everyone would like him. Everyone at her school, anyway. She wondered where he was going, now, and who he had met. Paris was good - she would not put it past any one of these public schools to be filled with the sort of person who would befriend Chat Noir. "Yeah?" she asked. That had to be huge for him. He dropped it like it was so small.

Chat thought, for a while.

"My father doesn't…" actually want him? Was that true? Gabriel had held onto him so tightly, there. He had grabbed onto his son and wept, like a child, drunk and small and only barely taller than Adrien was, now. It would have been a lie to say he wasn't wanted, just.. You know, he'd never been… "I was going to die. I don't think he wanted to love me, and now he's just … sort of forgotten how."

Several long beats of silence.

Chat shrugged. "I don't blame him."

Ladybug said, "You should."

Chat swallowed.

She drew circles into the space, there, between his shoulder and his chest.

Chat said, "Thanks, LB."

* * *

By Tuesday, Adrien Agreste had moved into his very first, very own apartment. It wasn't quite the top level of this complex - he hadn't been looking to buy someone out of their home, so he was limited to the places already on the market - but the view was good, and if you stood in the loungeroom and opened the curtains then you could see the city stretching out, all below - it was closer than it was, when he stood on the tower. Closer, and different, but somehow more personal. He liked that he could hear this person slam the bin's lid shut, or the excited chatter from the nearby park as people made their way home for the night. It was more intimate.

Anyway - Marinette, Nino and Alya loved his place, too. They loved especially that they had had the run of the furniture store to help him pick out something soft and squishy for the livingroom ("Dude! Awe-ha-_some_, you can host game night!"), but that couch wasn't here, yet. At the moment they were sitting on the floor in his livingroom, surrounded on all sides by his mountains of boxes. There were three bedrooms, here, and he would use at least one of them as a workshop for his designs, and outfits. Alya and Nino had taken it upon themselves to go through the terribly exhaustive task of picking through Adrien's games and consoles to figure out which ones they could best capitalise on, in the relatively little (compared to the mansion) space that his living room afforded them - but they were over there by the flatscreen, having whisper-arguments over Xbox versus PS4+. Adrien and Marinette were in the other corner of the room, with greasey Chinese take-out containers and chopsticks which they had been using intermittently for food or for swordfights, depending on if they both reached for noodles at the same time or not.

The curtains were open. The city was dark. Somewhere down the hall, one of Adrien's new neighbours was singing a song as she baked scones.

"So what made you decide to move out?" Marinette asked, leaning into his shoulder so she could steal some of the rice from Adrien's box. He offered it over to her - he wasn't stingy with sharing, unlike SOME people with their noodles.

"It was just time, I guess." He sneaked noodles while she wasn't looking. He smiled: "Besides, it's a good thing, right? I'm moving on up." Because he was so high up, compared to the mansion.

… Marinette shoved him with a chopstick, and confiscated his Chinese food because he did not deserve to eat if he made puns like that.

Adrien thought, what a good friend.

They sat and chatted and traded food until Marinette fell asleep against him, curled into his shoulder so she could 'win' some self-made War on Chopsticks (which she still had, trapped in Adrien's right hand, squashed flat between them because she was unwilling to relinquish her victory). Alya and Nino had to clear out, but they said goodnight as they left, and Alya pulled the curtains so that the lights of the city were dimmed, and they were left in darkness in the boxes, on the hardwood floors, leaning into that corner of the wall.

Adrien pulled his jacket over Marinette's shoulders, and fished around in her purse for her phone, so he could text her parents a quick _hello - Marinette's fallen asleep, is it okay if she stays at mine tonight?_ \- but of course it was. Those guys were the best.

Adrien felt very lucky to be a part of this makeshift family he'd found for himself.


	7. Don'tor

_Regular _kids got colds and went to school anyway because their parents insisted they weren't _that _sick, they had to go. ESPECIALLY Asian mothers - Adrien had seen Marinette at school before when she was essentially a walking zombie, because missing class just wasn't done in French-Chinese culture, apparently. So tell him: when _he _got a cold, which was **_just _**a cold, and he was _only _coughing, why was it that an Asian parent - who was not even HIS parent, Mrs Dupain-Cheng had only caught him trying to smother the cough on their way out the door after he'd picked Marinette up - why was it that Mrs Dupain-Cheng saw fit to send _him _to a hospital bed? She'd not been having any it. He'd tried to tell her that it was fine, that sometimes people got colds, but you know - Marinette had reached up to find the fever, and then _she'd _been worried, and Mrs Dupain-Cheng had said she'd make soup and run it over once the bakery closed, and before he could say 'boo' Adrien had been bundled into the back of Tom Dupain-Cheng's minivan and delivered to the emergency department of the closest hospital. Just to be safe. "We're worried about you, young man, you will let them check you out. Is that understood?"

Tom knew how to get through to him. Adrien had STILL been trying to argue, but he said, quietly, now, "Yes, sir."

"Good man."

(Adrien's insides did a pleased little twisty thing, which felt warm, and he thought it was terribly unfair that they KNEW how to make him all melty and warm like that, they were using it to their advantage.)

It wasn't even _his _hospital. Francine was nowhere to be seen - the nurses here were all giggly and excited about having a celebrity in their midst and they asked for his autograph in between listening to his lungs and frowning intently, "You're sure you had a transplant?" like Adrien might have just imagined it. Whoops, silly me, I forgot! I'm still dying, you're right. My mistake.

In all honesty, as much as Adrien wanted to just be a regular kid, it was nice to be sitting in a bed rather than climbing the ridiculous amount of stairs at school. Now that he was here, too, there was no reason to pretend he wasn't sick, so he could cough properly - freely - and honestly, really, he was concerned. You know? When isn't it terrifying to catch a cold this soon after a transplant? It's either a cold, or it's rejection, or it's a cold which will _lead _to rejection, or… and he was really, really tired. He shouldn't have gone moping about in the dead of night in the RAIN last week, he'd been soaked through. What had he expected?

They x-rayed his lungs and told him to get some rest, which Adrien thought was a spectacular idea. Nurse Jerome helped him into his bed, "We'll get those scan results through shortly and a doctor should be in…" blah blah, and then something about chasing paperwork Adrien's careteam had apparently forgotten to submit his last visit, and Adrien had enough time to think _maybe I should call Lady… _before he fell asleep.

* * *

Marinette's new friend Adrien gave her some insight into how Chat Noir's life must be, but she definitely never thought to compare them. After all - here was Adrien, asleep and lungs rattling with whatever latest bug this was, and he was so pale. He'd been scared, too, when Tom had bundled him into the car - he'd been trying to hide it, but Marinette could tell. Frightened. This was huge, any cold or cough or flu was huge when it was putting a new pair of lungs to the test. Chat Noir wasn't scared, ever, or he never told her that he was. Was he? Maybe? It was very like him to pretend that he wasn't, actually, she realised, watching Adrien's chest rise and fall. She was gripping the handles of the little mesh bag in both hands. The room smelt like her mother's noodle soup. The egg she'd cracked into the boiling water before she left was white, now, she could see it through the plastic lid.

Adrien shifted. Something in his chest rumbled - she could hear it, the catch in his throat - he almost woke up just to clear it, struggling to surface. Marinette slipped the bag onto the little set of drawers beside his bed and came to sit in the chair beside the hospital bed, so she could reach his hair. It wasn't a conscious decision, really - she reached into Adrien's hair to pat him, gentle, and soothe away the struggle, so he coughed and rolled back into sleep instead of having to be conscious at the world - and it was over before she quite had time to process the decision, so it was up to Tikki to dart out and demand, "Marinette, what are you **_do_ **ing?!"

"Gah!" she shot to her feet and had to cover her mouth so she didn't startle Adrien into waking, she'd so very almost yelled - Tikki had to dodge, because Marinette's other hand shot up in a _don't shoot _sort of way and almost smacked her into the wall - "Oh, nothing! Me? No. Nothing, I wasn't patting, don't… worry…"

"Marinette."

Marinette dropped to her knees beside Adrien's bed, groaning, and buried her face in the blankets, there, beside his legs. "I can't keep them separate, Tikki, I want them to be the same. Chat's out there on his own, who's bringing _him _noodle soup?"

"Chat Noir's pretty likable, Marinette! If you're really worried about him, you could try bringing him some of the leftovers - I know your mum made a huuuge pot! I'm sure he'd appreciate it."

Marinette looked at Tikki. Tikki looked at Marinette. Marinette looked much like a tea kettle getting ready to whistle. "Sorry I couldn't be there when someone cut out your lungs, Chat Noir, here's some soup," she whispered.

Tikki frowned at her, arms crossed. "That's not fair, Marinette. He didn't call you."

"He should have known he could!" she was on her feet again - "what if he thought - what if he thought I just didn't care, what if he didn't - Tikki, what if he almost died and I didn't know about it? What if it happens again, what if he gets a cold like this one and he doesn't have anybody to make him soup, or to tell his idiot face not to go to school, and - Tikki?" Marinette had spun around, again, to face her kwami, but Tikki was gone. She span, again - "Tikki?"

"... Ma'am?" asked a doctor, from the doorway, and Marinette jumped violently away from the woman and into - over - Adrien's bed. She jumped into Adrien's bed, scrambled over Adrien Agreste (who was gasping awake, startled at having the weight of his probably-three-foot-something friend catapulted into his waist), and fell out the other side of the bed, so that she had to pop up again like a daisy to peek at the medical professional who was, at present, wondering whether Marinette was in need of her services. "... Are you okay?" the doctor asked.

"Oh, yes, I just air my thoughts like that, you know, it's good to do it, we're studying soliloquies in school! Hahaha, Hamlet, right?"

Fortunately, Adrien chose this moment to slur, "Marinette?" like he was drunk, a hand reaching up to scrub at one of his eyes - when had he fallen asleep? Why did his head feel so heavy? - and the doctor came to do her job, rather than interrogate the teenage girl who had planted herself at this handsome celebrity model's bedside. It took him a good five minutes to wake up properly, but once he had Adrien leanred that the doctor's name was Bernadette, and she was eager to talk to Adrien about how his transplant was going. It was really lucky he'd got a pair just in time! How does he feel about that?

She was still holding his wrist (to check his pulse, he thought, but that seemed like a very outdated method - Dr Bernadette was taking her sweet time, and he did not know what she was waiting for) when she said, idly, "It's quite a coincidence, actually - we had a young girl come into our ED at around the same time. She wanted to be an organ donor."

Adrien's heart lurched so physically in his chest that he worried his lungs had just slipped out of position and were dangling, loose, into his stomach (he did not have a very good hold on human anatomy). Why was Dr Bernadette telling him this? Surely that had to be against some code of ethics, and even - even if - if it was true? What if it _was _true, did that mean that this woman knew who his donor family was? Who the _donor _was? Adrien wasn't crazy enough to think that he should go chasing them down if they didn't want to be found but he had to admit there was a _yearning _, you know, to.. To thank them, or… to know something about the girl whose lungs were breathing in his body, now? How had she died? Was she scared? What had she done with the lungfuls of air she'd had before he'd borrowed them? What life had she lived, was she finished? Adrien didn't think he would ever be finished.

All of these things rushed through him, all at once, each successive one more loud than the last: first confusion; anger, on the family's behalf; worry; hope; _want _ing; disgust, with himself; it resolved into some tight knot of nerves in his stomach and a trembly, "Oh?" which, itself, was succeeded by its own bout of coughing. They'd put him on antibiotics, now, though - that's why he was so groggy, Adrien was always out of it when he was on medication. It was just a precaution. They reckoned he'd be okay.

Still, Dr Bernadette watched him closely, for a moment, and Adrien wondered why they bothered with their expensive machinery when their doctors could x-ray patients just by looking at them.

"Mm," Dr Bernadette agreed, and she released his wrist to make a note in some file, somewhere. "It was quite a bad case of head trauma. It's funny, I didn't know the family had made the final approval. They seemed quite set against it."

There was absolute silence, for a while. Marinette, who was still sitting there, perched in the chair beside Adrien's bed, asked, "What?"

The doctor drew her hands back into herself, and went to throw a look into the hallway. She was waiting for someone, Adrien realised, with some sick twist in his stomach. Who? Who would be coming, what did this have to do with anything? Was she waiting for the donor's family to come in and yell at him for taking a set of lungs their daughter had insisted on donating, anyway? He traded a look with Marinette, who reached out to take his hand as absently as she had reached to pat his hair, earlier. Adrien accepted her easily. Neither of them noticed the intimacy of the action, the way he squeezed her hand twice and she squeezed back her answer, a ritual as good as ingrained.

Dr Bernadette crossed her arms in the doorway, there, and sighed at them, assessing. Whatever she was thinking about, she didn't like it. She looked at Adrien like he was something particularly smelly she had found on the bottom of her shoe.

"It just all seems very unusual, you understand. We've tried to contact Nurse Francine from your nominated hospital, but she's apparently retired to Hawaii, after failing to file the appropriate paperwork for a transplant to a patient not even approaching the top of the waiting li-"

"What are you saying?" he felt numb. The lungs, and the rest of his insides, and dropped out of him and evaporated into the air, never to be seen or heard from again. He knew what she was saying.

"Your donor's injuries were not accidental, Mister Agreste, and you are _very _rich." She cut to the point. Dr Bernadette had finished waiting - she stepped out of the way matter-of-factly, her high-heels clicking decisively with the movement. Marinette's nails were digging, hard, into the back of Adrien's hand. What was _she _thinking? Surely she didn't think he -?

"Mister Agreste, I wondered if we could ask you some questions?" police officers. Two police officers stepped into the room. That's who Bernadette was waiting for.

Adrien turned - "Marinette," he begged, because of all the people in this entire room it was her opinion which mattered to him, most, "I don't - I didn't-"

"I know," she promised, vague. Adrien's stomach was still twisting with nerves. Her promise somehow didn't settle him, and he didn't know why because it should have, only her voice held some _but _and whatever _but _she had about this, she was very wrong. He didn't have anything to do with it. He would never - the idea of it - and Francine! Francine would never, she'd been his nurse since she'd sat with him that day, and…

"The money to forge paperwork and move to Hawaii had to come from somewhere," someone said. Adrien didn't know who. He didn't care to look.

Marinette was looking at him. She was looking very, very apologetic, and it made him cold all over. "Adrien," she said (he forgot to breathe), "you said he was relieved," and Adrien had said this, he remembered it, he had told Marinette how he'd been caught up and clung to - Marinette asked him, gentle, "but I don't - I don't remember you saying. Was your father _surprised_?"

* * *

A/N: Thanks for waiting for this update, guys! I'm still writing that dissertation and I probably won't have time to write another chapter until the first draft is finished middle of September, but this was a nice break from dealing with Foucauldian conceptualisations of identity.

Also: fucking Gabriel, right? More to come. It will end up being LadyNoir and Adrienette, eventually, I promise - they're just going to have to deal with the fallout of Adrien's entire life firs


	8. Escape to the Catacombs

Gabriel Agreste loved his son.

It wasn't like Adrien hadn't been wanted. Emilie might have been more wildly in love with the idea of parenthood - Gabriel had worried about the stability of the company, in those days, and how they could be sure they'd be able to provide for a child - but he had wanted someone to fill in the empty spare room. He had been quite taken to the idea of a Little Them, and then it had been Adrien and he was somehow six thousand times more beautiful than either of them could have imagined. Adrien was theirs, and beautiful, and he laughed like there was something wild in his lungs, this golden-haired child who could challenge the sun. Emilie adored him. Gabriel loved him, truly.

And then Emilie had gotten ill, and things had changed, and - and - well, somebody had to look after the company, didn't they? Practically. Really. Gabriel was all for Emilie's sentimentalism, but the money for her treatments had to come from somewhere. She loved the both of them so wildly that she refused to let go until she absolutely had to, and when you marry someone you swear to support them. So he supported her.

It would have been cruel to deprive Adrien of whatever time he had left with his mother. What place was there, either, for a child in the guts of the Agreste headquarters? There were no playgrounds thee. There weren't kind nurses who would hold his hand when Emilie was so choked up she was sick. Headquarters wasn't any place for their son.

It was difficult, you know, to communicate all of that to a child. _I love you, but_, just didn't really cut it. I love you, but spend more time with your mother. I love you, but don't talk to me while I'm working to keep her alive. I love you, but I can't be there for your award ceremony from your class in the hospital's schoolroom, or that time you won your soccer match against that kid from the children's ward and you turned to the stands, but Mum was already in for some surgery she needed and you had to celebrate alone.

By the time Emilie had passed away, it was already too late. Adrien had his diagnosis, and he wasted no breath on beating around the bush. Adrien was not his mother. He did not have anybody he loved enough to even try to stay for.

It hurt, but then, so did everything, when it came to illnesses like these.

Anyway, Gabriel thought, as he packed this next suitcase full of everything the bank had let him withdraw - anyway, he loved his son, and there were worse things to become a wanted criminal for than the act of paying off a team of doctors to transplant a pair of lungs which would have gone into a crematorium, otherwise. It was luck the lungs had come avaiable right at the last moment - he hadn't, like, murdered anybody, though he had heard whisperings of it from the staff he'd paid off. He had no doubt someone might try to push the idea he'd been involved in murder. He wasn't sure if he had been; it did seem awfully convenient she'd died just at the right moment, but he hadn't told anybody to do anything like that. Just made a promise that he'd pay them handsomely if his son had a new pair of lungs.

"But where are we going?"

"Silence, Nooroo."

It had been so long, Gabriel hardly noticed the haunting presence of his kwami, anymore. He packed away his belongings and finalised Nathalie's instructions - the company would have to manage without him, and no offense to Adrien, but that child had never had the backbone required when you're running a corporate entity. Nathalie would manage it. She'd been his shadow for years, she would know how to keep everything above water - and there wasn't a reason to chase a fortune, anymore. Yes, fortunes were nice - he enjoyed being a multibillionaire - but Adrien was well looked after, now. Even if the company completely collapsed without Gabriel there to watch over it, his son would be okay.

Gabriel peeled one of the blockout curtains back, just to peek at the approaching procession of police cars. His status in the city meant that they weren't flashing their lights and sirens - this was just a polite visit, probably, to ask him some questions - and that was good, because it meant it would be easier to sneak out unannounced while the police were still politely searching the mansion, sure that Gabriel was only holed up somewhere and busy. Nooroo packed his ties into the little spaces left in this latest bit of luggage and Gabriel zipped it shut.

The police officers were getting out of their cars, now, down at the front gates. Starting to wonder why they weren't being let in. Soon someone would slip through the bars, or climb the wall, and they'd start knocking at the front door - they knew he was in here. It was time to go.

Good thing this mansion had so many different escape routes. Paranoid? Ha. Practical.

Gabriel folded the letter for Adrien and put it down on his bedside table. Someone would find it, and hopefully they would deliver it, after they'd torn it open and gone looking for whatever evidence they wanted to charge him with. At the very least, this letter held Gabriel's full confession - he took whole responsibility for what he had done, and he made it clear that Adrien had not had a clue.

It was decent, was what it was.

Gabriel picked up his luggage, and he escaped through some underground tunnel into the Parisian night - the catacombs would be his refuge, now.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Adrien was staring at the ceiling.

Plagg had had to read him the letter. Adrien had tried, several times, but he always got caught up on the fact he didn't know his father's handwriting well enough to have even realised it was Gabriel's, until it said my son and he knew that it definitely wasn't Emilie's writing. You know? They didn't even know each other's writing, and his father had still - Gabriel had -

He shut his eyes.

Plagg had to read him the letter. There were details of Gabriel's crime, yes, but those were addressed to whom it may concern; several paragraphs down he started the letter to Adrien, and Adrien really just wished that he hadn't. What was the value of I love you in these circumstances? Wouldn't it have been kinder - easier - better for everybody if his father had just - what, left? Adrien didn't know if he should be angry. He was furious. And then Gabriel wrote down something like and I love you, and it demanded some sort of response from him. I love you demanded an answer, and he hated it. Why now?

Why now when any time before this, any second of the entire previous 17 years of his life, Adrien had needed that? How did his father manage to love him only when it happened to hurt?

"And he says he got the letter you wrote for the family. He doesn't know who you're dating, but he wishes you the best." Plagg left the letter where it was and crawled onto Adrien's chest.

With absolutely no guile, or vindictiveness, Adrien said, "Claws out," because he was going to be alone in this hospital room right up until he decided to leave it - there was a guard on the door, now protecting him from the media maelstrom rather than ensuring he didn't make a break for it. They'd not been sure he was innocent, up until recently. Which was nice, he suppposed - not being charged with a crime as bad as this one - but he was still walking around with this pair of lungs someone had given up, unwillingy. And what was he going to do about that?

Anyway. Adrien transformed, and then he was Chat Noir, and it wasn't really so that he could get rid of Plagg. Transforming like this didn't silence the kwamis, really; he could feel Plagg still there, somehow, their two consciousnesses pressed up against each other, and it was comfortable and warm and better because Adrien did not have to find words for all of these things that curled in his chest, he could just feel them and Plagg could just understand. This was better.

His family - the Dupain-Chengs, and Alya, and Nino - would be trying to get into his room, right now. He knew that, objectively. Now that he had been cleared of charges they would be trying to get in, because theoretically the police had no excuse to keep them out anymore, only Adrien had asked them to. He didn't want to see those guys. He didn't want to see anybody.

God, he didn't want to see Ladybug, especially. What was he going to tell her? Nothing. He wasn't going to tell her anything, because lightning doesn't strike twice, telling her what had happened would be the same as telling her his identity.

Tears.

Adrien - Chat - swallowed them. He breathed. The air came freely into this pair of lungs. He could feel its path all the way down into his chest, and he didn't know what to do about it.

What do you do about being alive when you're not meant to be?

What do you do about taking a life you want to give back?

When it isn't even your fault and you still have to live with this stupid guilt which eats you up and you can't talk to -

"Cataclysm," he said, and he rolled over to touch the letter, and watch it crumble into dust, because it did not interest him whether his father thought that this was some sick form of love or not. It was cruel, to have sent the letter, and Adrien had had enough cruelty to last a lifetime.

Adrien lay there until his transformation expired. Silence, then, for a while, until Plagg asked, "Okay, kid?"

He swallowed. "Yeah."

Plagg didn't leave, anyway.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

A/N: Just a short chapter to clarify some things from the previous chapter! I got a lot of comments from people unclear on what had happened etc because I rushed through it - still doing my dissertation, focusing on that! - so I thought I'd clear a couple of things up. See you guys next month!


	9. Still Floating

"Can you imagine? He must feel terrible."

Chat Noir was sitting at the very edge of some rooftop, watching the sea of media down below. They were hanging out outside the hospital's exit - Adrien was set to be checked out, officially, in a few hours. He'd still not spoken to any of his friends, because he still had not had any idea what he could possibly say to them. He'd come to sit here and watch because it was less suffocating, up here, on this rooftop, where nobody knew or cared that he was sitting and waiting and breathing with lungs that were not his to own. Chat had thought he'd done a pretty good job of sneaking out of the hospital room without being noticed, but apparently Ladybug had seen him - or maybe she'd just spotted him up here, on this rooftop, watching. They had a sort of awareness about each other, and the rooftops. It wouldn't have surprised him if she had just spotted his feet, threaded through the railing, and come to say hello.

Ladybug sat beside him. After several days of being denied entry to Adrien Agreste's hospital room, and no reply, and nothing, she had been considering sneaking in through his window, as Ladybug herself, to ask whether he thought he was fooling anybody with his angsty angst face. Of course Adrien had had no idea. Of course it was not his fault. Of course nobody thought that this was going to happen, but it had, hadn't it, and he still had a whole plethora of people out there in the waiting room who were, even still, _yelling_ their arguments with his police-stationed guards, and couldn't he see that? Didn't that _matter,_ more than some stupid decision his father had made for him? But he must have been in the bathroom, or something, when she dropped in, and then she'd spotted Chat Noir out here on this rooftop and maybe Chat could make sense of it. Maybe Chat -

But no, Chat Noir was only angsting HIS angst face, as well. Maybe it was because he had his own set of lungs to wonder about. She didn't know. It was annoying, though, and she was cranky about it - this cat! He and Adrien would get along, oh boy. They liked their laughter? Ha. They liked their pouting.

Chat turned to look at her, pulled out of his stupor because he realised (in the violence of her movements, how_ sharply_ she had sat herself beside him), "You're angry." It wasn't quite a question, more of a statement. She didn't think, seriously, that Adrien had had anything to do with it; Chat trusted Ladybug implicitly, he knew she would not think something that would hurt him that badly, regardless of whether she knew it was him or she didn't. So he wasn't asking, just … reminding her that that's what she was feeling, now, like maybe she had tripped into it, accidentally, as one might trip accidentally on uneven flooring.

"_Look_ at all these people!" she gestured, emphatic, to the crowd.

Chat Noir crossed his arms over the top of the railing and rested his chin on his elbow: "They won't leave him alone." Yeah. That was worth being -

"No," she disagreed, frustrated, still, "I went up there, just now. He's hiding. How can you hide from all these people who want to help you? I can't imagine what it's like, but he's -"

"You think the media wants to help him?"

Silence, for a while.

What Marinette really thought was that Adrien could not breathe, in there, alone, in his room with nobody there to hold him, and it was probably why he was still locked up inside. It was because if he didn't feel like he could breathe then maybe he could wish the lungs away, somehow. It was stupid.

She reached out, to touch Chat's arm. "They're not your lungs, Chat Noir." Ladybug reminded him, very gently, because this must have mattered to him. This must have been huge, for him, that Adrien Agreste - another recipient - had somehow cheated his way to the top, accidentally. But Chat Noir (Ladybug believed) was an orphan. He was alone. He didn't have anyone to buy him lungs, or an illegal surgery, or all of his nurses' early retirements.

Chat said nothing.

His insides were all curling up, and drying out, and turning into something tight and terrible which settled in his throat. Ladybug was right. These weren't his lungs.

He swallowed it.

"I wish he would let someone in," she said.

"I wish he didn't have someone else's lungs."

Ladybug reached out, to take Chat's hand with her own. She slipped her fingers through his. Held on. They were both feeling terrible, and they had each only just now noticed, and it was better, really, when they held onto each other.

Adrien - Chat - lifted her hand up so he could kiss the back of her knuckles, careful, because he felt like they were a million miles away from each other even though here they were. Right here. On this rooftop, like always, like they always were. She reached, with her other hand, to touch his cheek. Barely.

"I love you," Ladybug told him, on the thrill of realisation that he needed someone to tell him. It didn't matter whether it was romantic - she didn't know, she knew that something twisted in her chest when she thought about life without him, she knew he left her breathless, but she didn't know what that meant - it didn't matter: it was very true, deeply, and at a basic level, and he was hers. She had him. She had his back, and he was hers, and she had him.

His heart squeezed. Chat Noir shivered, and dipped closer, and had to swallow, again, because when you let go of something that big and that terrible it leaves some gaping hole in your chest, and you have to reach for something to fill it. Ladybug could fill every part of him. He was on board with that.

They kissed, there.

With little thought, and no conversation about it, Marinette rocked up onto her knees and closed the distance between them, and when she felt him let go of her hands she used them to pull him closer, fingers tangled in his hair. The movement was electric - there was something in how she caught onto him, clearly, because all of a sudden he knew she was sure, or he realised she was there, or something, because Chat came up to meet her, properly, and kiss her, and all of the pressure in his chest - all of the terror and the stress and the worry and the - everything -

And Ladybug loved him, and he melted, at last, and at least she could fix this. If she could not see Adrien, or know how he was doing, or any of these things for one of her friends - if she could not look after her friend, at least she knew how to look after the person that was Hers.

When he broke away, he was breathing, again, and she wondered when it was that he had stopped, because it seemed so obvious that he'd only just started, now.

Chat's forehead was in her shoulder. Ladybug's arms were wrapped around him.

Neither of them said a word. This wasn't normal. It wasn't something they did.

It did _not_ feel wrong.

Chat Noir opened his mouth, and Ladybug was shifting to accept him into her lap ("Oh," she breathed) before he'd even quite managed to figure out what to say, but then he said, "LB," with complaint, and he broke down, and clung on, and he cried. She patted his hair. She did not go anywhere. She stayed.

What could have happened, to make him…?

"Hey," she patted his ears down, "hey, kitty."

He came up to kiss her, again. It was horrible. It wasn't a romantic kiss at all. He was leaking tears and crying and it was probably really gross, actually; he would not have picked now, here, as the time for their second kiss.

Still.  
You took what you could get, when you were living on stolen time.

* * *

They formally called off the search for Gabriel Agreste not because they didn't want to charge him, but because if all their sources were right then he'd gone somewhere into the catacombs, and they weren't going to risk good police officers getting lost down there. Gabriel himself might even have been lost down there - they'd been looking for him for more than the three days they knew someone might survive down there, without any preparation, and though they were still interviewing the various, deeply horrified staff of Gabriel Agreste, nobody seemed to be helping him. Nobody had any idea where he was.

They'd come to ask Adrien, eventually. Did he think his father had a death wish, going down in those tunnels beneath Paris? And Adrien didn't really know how to answer it - all signs pointed to Gabriel being unable to survive where he was. They'd tailed Nathalie, even, for a 72 hour period, just to make sure (because Adrien told them that she would know, if anyone would), but Nathalie was not dropping food or water into the catacombs on her way to file paperwork. There was evidence his father had packed his belongings - had been packing, even, Adrien thought, on the same night Adrien had found him there, drunk and slurring and cruel - and taken them with him, but it all seemed outlandishly optimistic, to think that he could survive down there on his own without assistance. No. Adrien thought about it for a long while, but the answer was no - if his father had packed his belongings it was because he'd thought he'd need them. Maybe he wasn't in the catacombs after all. Maybe he was paying someone off to supply him with food and water. Maybe, Adrien thought numbly, a million different things, but he did not think his father was dead most strongly because he truly believed he would have felt something physical in his chest, the same tearing he had felt when Mum died (it had felt visceral, and biological - whatever his father was, criminal or not, he was still Adrien's_ father_, surely that still meant he would have FELT something?), and he hadn't felt that at all. He felt - then, in that moment, with police officers surrounding him asking his opinion on whether his father might be alive - he felt empty, and numb.

"No way," Plagg told him, now, from the window, "they've got tents!"

Day five of the debacle, and of course - Adrien thought - of course they had tents. Adrien was never shaken by anything, and this had obviously rocked him to his core (as it ought to have done), and those cameras were not going anywhere. What was he going to do, wait them out for the rest of his life? No, he wasn't. Adrien sat up, and began to collect his things, at last, though of course he had not exactly had them strewn about the room in the first place - it was a matter of shoving the clothes into his overnight bag and picking out something that looked formal enough that he could go downstairs and face this crowd of people without doing even further damage to the Agreste label. The absolute last thing he needed at this point was to worry about where he was going to be getting an income (he thought, needlessly, as though he could not survive on the literally billions of euros his father had left behind), or his own, publicised inability to run a company. Adrien had always been a model, yes, but he'd been behind the scenes before. He'd inserted himself there, before; he'd wanted to be closer to his father. He'd watched his father make deals and fake smiles, and he might not have been as ruthless, but that wasn't exactly a flaw.

Anyway. He got up, and he combed his fingers through his hair, peering into the glass of a picture frame hanging on one of these walls.

"You're not going down there? They'll eat us alive!" Plagg switched so fluidly from 'you' to 'we'. Adrien felt a surge of appreciation for his kwami, which made him grin, and he realised - still looking at his reflection - that he almost looked human, today. What a nice change.

"It's just the media, Plagg. Ladybug's right. All I'm achieving locked up in here is isolating myself."

"What's wrong with isolation? We have cheese!" Plagg zoomed over to shove this whole wheel of camembert into Adrien's face, not as an invitation to eat it - no, it was Plagg's - but as an invitation to SEEEEEEE?, and it made Adrien smile wider.

"You're a talking stomach."

"Exactly. I've isolated the important parts of my personality and frankly, I would be more grateful for it, if I were -"

But Adrien had satisfied himself with how he looked, now, and was picking up his overnight bag to go. All he WAS doing in here was isolating himself, and that wasn't just a problem because Ladybug was unimpressed. It was a problem because he had never in his entire life liked to be isolated, and he had already spent the first seventeen years of his life or so letting his father isolate him, anyway. There was absolutely no reason to keep up with that, now. Adrien was better than that. What did he want, to sit around here and be miserable for the rest of his life? Was that doing anybody any good? Adrien really, truly believed in restorative justice. (He was a superhero: he had to.) And there were not many things that Adrien could do to fix this situation, but certainly being guilty forever wasn't going to contribute anything to anybody, victim or not (and maybe he was a victim - he didn't like the label, but he didn't feel like a perpetrator), so it was time to try something else. Unless he wanted, you know, to stagnate, because it was easy.

(He was a superhero. Stagnating because it was easy wasn't really something he could do, either.)

Adrien thanked the guard posted at his door and went to the nurse's desk to check himself out, though five of the different nurses rose to greet him the instant he stepped out, to see whether they could help - anything at all, Mr Agreste - but no, he just wanted to check out, so they all exchanged anxious glances and organised the paperwork. He signed it. Maybe he technically shouldn't have had the right to - he was 17, not quite old enough to speak on his own behalf - but nobody said anything about it, so there.

When Adrien at last made his way to the front doors of the hospital, he hesitated. There were… there were people who had been texting, and calling, and wanting him, and Adrien had been neglecting them and it had been bad of him. He knew all of these things. Before he quite stepped into the media's line of sight Adrien took out his phone, to look at it, and see the hundred-plus missed calls (family, and media; both), and thirty-something messages from each of his friends, as well as Mr and Mrs Dupain-Cheng.

He would have to apologise.

Adrien opened the text screen, to text Alya, because he knew that she would be able to take the message and spread it like wildfire and everybody would understand that he had texted her not because he didn't love them, but because Alya had a knack for information spreading.

What was he going to say?

[TEXT]: Sorry. I'm going home now. Come?

That's what he sent, eventually, after backspacing thrice over different sentiments and words and turns of phrase. He was sorry, and he was going home, and he wanted them, now, so he invited them all.

Adrien turned his phone off, tucked it away, and stepped out into the line of fire. As expected, the wall of media closed in on him like waves closing in on a lone, worn little sailboat, but at least he was still floating.

* * *

**A/N:** 'Ingrid, should you not be writing a dissertation?' well, my friends, the answer is yes. Yet here we are!


	10. Deserve

Adrien Agreste was very quiet, as he walked the streets of Paris. The city was booming - Paris did love him, genuinely, even after the whole scandal there were people who really did support and love him. Paris was wonderful , like that, he loved this city with all his heart. He stopped to pose with a few fans who asked for quick snapshots, and happily signed away the different autographs he was asked for - "I thought you didn't like signing autographs?" someone asked him.

He laughed. "I guess I do today. It's really cool meeting all you guys!"

He was warm, and the model (pardon the pun) of perfection. If anyone tried to photograph him during that walk - and a lot of people did - then they would find that there wasn't an angle he didn't look good from; there were no lapses of attention, no zonings-out as he watched Ladybug and her partner sail by, up there, out on patrol. He was not rude to anybody, and did not ignore any of the questions put to him, in fact he seemed to be relieved to be offered the opportunity to answer them. Never a full interview - he wouldn't hold a whole interview there on the street - but he took a couple of questions, which could be aired in the in-betweens and gossip segments of news programs. They served to emphasise that he really hadn't known about the whole steal-your-organs thing. They served to emphasise that he was working hard on his studies, and keeping the company afloat even after this devastating news, and he would really appreciate the support of the city as he struggled to balance that and keeping up with his regimen, and work, and finding universities to apply for (he could apply for UNIVERSITIES! He had a FUTURE!), and everything.

It made for some very good media bites, anyway.

Adrien stopped to pick up a few bags of groceries and a hot meal from a curry place his father had always liked, and by that time the various cameramen that had gathered to follow him had cleared out, because he was only trying to eat his lunch and do the domestic things that a 17yo in his own apartment for the first time ever had to do. There were, actually, more exciting things in the city than watching Adrien buy a bar of soap and a plastic jug for water with a water filter in it. So there were no cameras there when, haltingly, Adrien threw a glance around, and ducked into some side-alley, whose shadows swallowed him whole. There were no cameras there to watch it when Adrien pried open this little alleyway's entrance into the thousands-of-years-old tunnels dug into the guts of his favourite city in the world, and nobody saw him drop into the catacombs, groceries and water-filters in hand.

Mayura praised his good work. He had performed excellently. Soon he would be free to spend time with people as he pleased, he just first must deliver these items - no, it did not matter who was going to retrieve them - and then he would be free.

Only Hawkmoth saw the shock of betrayal on this Adrien's face before he vanished, and by then it was too late. And besides - what could a sentimonster feel, anyway? They were manipulations of magic, not people. Soon, Adrien - the real one - would hear rumours of his supposed presence in this area of Paris, and he would come to investigate it, and then they could be together, at last, a family. He would learn everything Gabriel had been doing, these past several years, to save his mother's life. The sentimonsters (plural: Mayura would send others) would help Gabriel to find food, and water, in the in-between, until they could get Adrien's attention - but he didn't expect that to take very long. All they had to do, now, was wait.

* * *

"Thank you all for coming here, today," Ladybug greeted the media team. Chat Noir had been put out ever since the scandal with Adrien Agreste had started, and don't even ment ion Adrien - he had turned up back at his house and he'd let himself be hugged and wanted and thanked-for-still-existing, by everybody, but he was devastated. Walking-around-like-a-zombie sort of devastated, but a zombie who thought that he was better all of a sudden because he had decided to be, like making the decision to not be undead could fix the fact he had crawled out of his grave, almost literally, and was now moping about the place. This had shaken Adrien to his core, and Chat, as well, and Ladybug could only imagine what it had done to all of the recipients of organ donations, all the people who were sitting there hoping and hoping and hoping (and probably hating themselves, because what are they hoping for - hoping that somebody will die, so that they can live? Ladybug had hoped for that, for Chat, and it had almost destroyed her), and now that hope was reflected back to them in very plain terms.

Chat didn't think that they needed to speak to the media about this, but Ladybug did. She was hosting this media event, Chat was only there as moral support. Maybe there because she wanted to be his moral support. Anyway - they needed to talk to the media about this because Chat Noir himself had been the one to teach her that 99% of a superhero's job is akumatisation prevention, that being a good superhero isn't just about battling the monsters that manifest outside of people's heads, and everybody needed just a little boost, now. After something like what Gabriel Agreste had done to his son ( to him, because Adrien had been a victim), everybody needed a little bit of superhero, and she didn't know how to touch everybody without the cameras trained on her. Even if the microphones made her shy. Even if she always, always moved to duck behind Chat Noir, because Chat had always been the one to handle the cameras.

She was stalling, now, so Chat filled the silence with, "We really appreciate it,"s, words which were polite and filled in the time that Ladybug needed to figure out what she wanted to say, in.

She put a hand on Chat Noir's arm. He directed the conversation, smoothly, so that it ended in, "But I think Ladybug's the one who really knows why we're here. Bugaboo?" and a squeeze of her arm, to remind her that yes, it was her turn to speak.

They made such a good team, she thought, absently, and it sort of stole the breath from her (as it did, sometimes, when she thought about Chat Noir - and especially the kiss - OhNoDon'tThinkAboutThatNow!), and… "We wanted to speak to everybody about organ donation," she said, before she lost track of it.

"LB," Chat said, because she had not told him why they were coming here, and he wished that she would have, if she really wanted to have a discussion about the whole Adrien thing in front of a sea of cameras. Couldn't she have afforded him the opportunity to steal himself, a little?

"No," Ladybug told him, and everybody who was gathered there - "No, we should. Organ donation is wonderful. It gives people life . I am sure you've all heard about the Agreste case, and what a young man's father has done to him." Silence. Ladybug lay a hand against Chat's chest, because he had bristled, beside her, and she comforted that sort of freezing Chat did even when she wasn't paying attention. His heart was beating rapidly, she could feel it. "And I am sure a lot of you are very angry about it. But we came here today because we wanted to make it clear, officially, as your superheroes," (and Chat relaxed, a little, because they had agreed on that so long ago, and it was reassuring, to be had - owned - by something he loved as much as he did: they - the team that he and Ladybug were - were Paris's, through and through), "that you shouldn't let somebody ruin something so beautiful. It is not wrong to feel hope. It is not bad that some of you-"

"Want to live," Chat breathed.

Ladybug looked at him. Her hand was still on his chest. She took his hand with her free one, now, and they held onto each other - it was strangely intimate, to stand like that, half-hugging by mistake, in public, but it did not feel wrong.

Chat swallowed something horrible. Ladybug heard it go down. She was relieved.

Chat said, "And it's not a bad thing that some of you are scared of what this means, now. But if you let something scary stop you from feeling hope, or you let it make you feel guilty," a glance at Ladybug, "then you're letting it win. And I know Paris is better than that."

One of the reporters closest to them pressed forward, camcorder in hand. "What do you have to say to the family of the girl who some people say was killed to give Monsieur Agreste another chance at life?"

Ladybug slid an arm around Chat's waist. He swallowed. This, of all things, was the last thing that he wanted to think about. That entire letter she had penned with him - it had gone to his father, he knew that now, but what if it had reached that girl's family? What if it had reached them, and rubbed it in their face, what would it have been like if he had not only stolen -

"We're superheroes," Ladybug said. "It isn't our role to say something to them any more than it is yours. What would you say?"

"Sorry," the reporter said, simply.

Adrien wondered if that would have been better than the thank-you that he had asked Ladybug to write. He wondered if that was really what the family would need to hear - he offered, "Someone is alive, because of them."

"Yeah, but not because he deserved it, he's just-" but the reporter cut himself short, because of the way half of the crowd of media, there - various people who had interviewed Adrien, or who knew him, or who were just decent people - the crowd stood up in varying degrees of protest, but all at once, a motion of general dissent.

Chat Noir's heart leapt out of his chest. All of a sudden, he was blinking back tears, and swallowing over this hard lump which had appeared right there, in his throat, and this evidence - this evidence that he was wanted, he had known that, he objectively did know that and yes he objectively did know that it was a good thing he was alive but to have it lain out for him, bare, and obvious, and this crowd would start a fight in a minute and -

"Organ donation isn't a matter of who deserves it," Ladybug told the young reporter, whom she had had to extract from the crowd. It was very plain. Organ donation just wasn't like that. Organs could go anywhere - to anybody - it could save any life, and you can't add prescriptions to them, it's not like you can sign away your left kidney but only to a ballerina who danced for the Queen at least thrice, your kidney's going to go wherever your kidney goes. Sometimes that will be a serial killer. Sometimes it will be a boy whose father did not know how to love, properly, and who had never bothered to learn, and who did not see a problem with cutting his son open and tearing pieces of him out, to make room for all the life the doctors could stuff in.

And Adrien? Adrien was none of those things, really. Not in the way that he would accept the label, the way a doctor might accept 'doctor' but not accept 'lover of potato chips' - Adrien was not just a boy whose father did not know how to love, and he was definitely not a ballerina who had danced for the queen. He was her friend. It leant some cold steel to the way she held onto this young man, who scrambled to get a good shot of her. "But for your information," she said, and a second ago she had not been angry, but listen to her now - "If even one more person in this city has a life where they can feel wanted, and loved, and feel like someone is glad that they are alive, then I think that's a good thing. And for your information," she let him go, so he stumbled back into the sea of media, now, but everyone was still, again, "I know a transplant recipient. And if one single person in this city laughs like she does," she changed the gender, to better conceal his identity, but Chat knew she was talking about him - "if there is anybody out there who knows what she sounded like when she laughed, before now, and - if there's someody who knows what Adrien sounded like, and what he sounds like when he laughs until his stomach hurts, then I think you would be hard-pressed to find any single way that anybody could imagine that was a waste of time." 'Deserve'? What did he mean, ' deserve '? Was Adrien not loved? Was anybody, really, truly not loved?

Chat put a hand on her shoulder, and then on her other arm, and he pulled her back into him because Ladybug was standing there and glowering at this reporter, who was now looking very small, and pulling his hood up to avoid being filmed by these cameras.

Chat said, "Don't film him," to the media, because 99% of a superhero's job was akumatisation prevention, even when it hurt. "Hey - Jerry," Adrien knew this reporter's name; Chat recognised him well enough - "that was a good question, but we're finished here, now. Why don't you ask the last question? I'll take it. You can use it for your youtube channel." Give him something.

Jerry pouted, but he did ask, "Who do you know who had a transplant?"

For a very brief second, Chat Noir considered just telling the truth. Because he'd just stood here and listened to Ladybug defend him, and he felt like falling into her and also like falling apart, and Jerry asked and Chat almost just told him the answer. But instead he said, "Ladybug is wonderful," because that was true, "it wouldn't surprise me at all if she made friends with a lot of donor patients on the waiting list, the last time we did a hospital visit for kids. Thanks, guys!"

Jerry maybe wasn't super satisfied with the answer - he was still grumbling - but at the very least he was not akumatised, because of the way Ladybug had publicly called him out, and that was nice.

* * *

A/N: HELLO AGAIN, my friends! This chapter was meant to head in a different direction after the whole sentimonster thing, but Ladybug got started and when she gets started she doesn't stop, it's one of Adrien's absolute favourite things about her. She's awesome. So I decided to let her rant a little in favour of plot development, hope that's okay with you guys! Thanks for your patience as everything evolves. P.S. Next chapter we're going to meet a spirometre!

You may also enjoy checking out "Love Still Matters", a little off-shoot of this story which I didn't end up fitting into the structure of FMLU but it's definitely with these versions of Marinette and Adrien, and it's just a nice little thing about how Adrien thinks about love!

As an update on my life - my dissertation is pretty much complete, we're just doing a last edit and then submitting it the 4th of November. I'm almost done with my Honours year and it's been a blast! I'm so pleased I decided to do it, even after starting this fic in between. Hope you guys enjoy this chapter!


	11. Sports Day

It was sports day, at last. Adrien was on a strict regimen to keep up with keeping these lungs healthy, and it was nice, at last, to have a pack of people to go on his morning runs with - that was the whole point of today! The highschool was hosting a sports carnival with a series of different events, and ribbons for the winners, and Kim was taking bets over who was going to win only EVERYbody bet on Marinette - apparently, she'd been winning since the beginning of time, and she was competitive enough to make sure it stayed that way! Adrien didn't mind, he thought, as he laced up his boots for the 500-metre sprint. If Marinette could outrun Chat Noir's civilian self, then that either meant she wouldn't make too shabby of a superhero, herself, or it meant that HE needed to step up his game! Either way, he'd be seriously impressed, and it was nice to just have sports to focus on, for the day. With the scandal about where his lungs had come from, and his father's disappearance, and everything that had happened, it was nice just to have something normal to focus on. Adrien had spent so much of his life wanting to be normal - what was more normal than a sports carnival in a public school where everybody bet against him and teased as he got ready?

"You're going down!" Marinette hollered, when he came out of the changerooms - Marinette had been, by far, the best at acting completely normal about where he'd got his lungs, and Adrien did sort of wonder about that, because from his judgement she was about as good at being natural about strange things as Ladybug was. Which was to say, she wasn't.

Still, he grinned. "Down my list of trophy cabinets, maybe. Hey, Marinette, are you interested in landscaping?"

"I -" Marinette scoffed, but she actually did not know what this had to do with competition-talk, so she asked, "what?"

Adrien's smile broadened. He hitched his backpack onto his shoulders! "I was just wondering what you were going to do with all the dirt I'm going to leave you in!"

With a half-bark of laughter, but mostly unbridled outrage, Marinette shoved him - how dare he! "Big talk, for a guy with new lungs! I'll save you a place at my award ceremony, if you can get there on time."

He laughed, walking backwards now (so that he could still face her), because they were each headed to the starting line. Only a small handful of students had volunteered to compete in this sprint, but of them, only Marinette and Adrien really stood a chance of winning - not that anyone bet on Adrien, besides Adrien. "How long's it been, a decade? Two?" he stepped into his lane - "that's some big talk, for a girl with_** old**_ lungs."

Marinette peeked over at him, over the top of her arm. They were each crouched in their starting positions and grinning at each other like they were the only two people on the planet, let alone Paris, and neither one of them noticed the BANG of the starting gun until their co-racers were already off and away.

"I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU MISSED THE START!" Adrien called, while Marinette cackled, wildly -

"YOU'RE IN SECOND LAST!" even though she, Marinette, was the person he was second to!

They raced, flat-out. It was only a five-hundred metre sprint, the idea of it was to go as hard and fast as they could for as long as they could - there was no pacing, there was no strategy, there was speed and endurance and that was about it. Marinette tore out ahead of the crowd with Adrien hot on her heels, in true Ladybug-and-Chat-Noir form, calling insults to each other over their gasps for air because the race was, now, essentially just these two, the rest of the group had been left behind and -

Marinette crossed the finish line first, fists thrown in the air and breathing too hard to be trading insults anymore. Her pulse pounded in her ears. She was breathless. Nathaniel, from art class, joined her a few seconds later, and she turned to say, HA, in his face, only he was not Adrien.

Adrien had not crossed the finish line and, in fact, neither had anybody else. Nathaniel did not look pleased to have earned himself second place - he had, in fact, been chasing, "Marinette," breathless, because Marinette was Adrien's closest friend, everybody knew that. Her heart dropped right out of her chest, her victory vanished right in that instant, and she whipped around to peer back, down the track - there, a hundred or so metres to go, was a huddle of people, all the runners, huddled in a group so tight she could not see Adrien. The pounding in her ears receded - she began to make out bits and pieces - the murmurings of the crowd, the concern, and Adrien's terrible, aching, lung-rattling coughs.

It chilled her to the bone. She had heard Chat cough like that, before and it had never been good, and Adrien - Adrien was not drawing enough air in between his gasps and coughs and sobs. He was crying.

"Adrien?" Marinette genuinely, really, did not remember how she got between the finish line and this space on the track - she must have run. All of a sudden, though, she was at this crowd, and shoving through shoulders and people and a handful of protests - there was a teacher, here, now, someone she didn't recognise, who was trying to calm Adrien down but it wasn't working (because he was _doing _it wrong) - Marinette sank to her knees in front of him. Adrien was doubled over, and coughing, and he - he couldn't - it must have been terrifying, because Marinette felt some of the fear, herself, she felt it radiating off of him, and the worry, and when he looked up and found her there - his eyes locked with hers - she was shocked to find what looked like shame, there. How could he be ashamed of something like this? "Adrien," she repeated, even though he could not breathe, and she reached out to catch his hand - this hand, here, the one closest to her - so that she could lift it to her chest.

Marinette didn't know how to help, really, but she dragged in a long, slow, deep breath, and she let him feel how her ribcage lifted with her, how her lungs expanded, how her chest filled. "Hey," she promised - it was a promise, whatever that promise was, her _hello_ \- "this must be really scary. You can breathe with me, okay?"

The school nurse had arrived, by now, but Adrien's eyes were only on Marinette. They were only on Marinette. He only - he only - this next breath in he gasped, and spluttered, but he found breath over the way that his heart was pounding in his chest. He didn't want to die. He didn't want his lungs to be rejected and then he needs a new donor and it's a miracle to even find one, and with his luck he was not going to find another, and he hadn't even technically FOUND one this one had been bought and that poor girl's family and -

"Hey, breathe," Marinette reminded him, so Adrien dragged in the next breath, as well, and the next. Soon enough his hands stopped shaking.

"Have you been using your spirometer?" Marinette asked him.

Adrien closed his eyes, and nodded his head yes, and leaned into her - Marinette sat herself down so that she could make space for him, in her lap. "We don't need an ambulance," she told the school nurse, because the nurse was trying to make a huge deal out of a light cough and a panic attack - Marinette had, in fact, been relieved to find him panicking, even if it had to be like this. At least he could still breathe. "Hey, has it been working?" to Adrien, again.

He shook his head, no. The spirometer was used to measure lung output, and as of late - in the past week or so - his percentage output had dropped by maybe ten per cent, and his doctors had told him to come back if that happened because it could be a sign of organ rejection, and he wasn't ready for these lungs to give up on him as well. He wasn't ready.

Marinette said, "You know ninety per cent of lung recipients experience organ rejection? It can be an acute episode. It doesn't have to be failing, they just need to change your immunosuppressants, Adrien, you can go in. You should." She spoke with authority. Marinette had done all of the research there was to do, on lung transplants - Adrien, meanwhile, had avoided the subject of it at all costs, and certainly not done any reading. In doctor's appointments he tried to get out as soon as possible. They had two very different approaches on how to deal with a transplant, Adrien and Marinette, and it was a good thing that Marinette had bothered to read a few websites about it, because otherwise he would have panicked like this for the rest of his considerably short life, refusing to get his meds changed.

Adrien asked, "Really?" in a voice that was very small. His breathing was sort of steadier, now.

"I'll go with you," she promised.

They were in the middle of the school's oval, remade into a track for the sports carnival. Some people were filming this little exchange, now that International Top Model Adrien Agreste had finished trying to hack one of his bought-lungs out of his body.

"Can we go now?"

* * *

When Adrien said he was familiar with hospitals, he meant that he was - well, familiar with hospitals. He was in and out. It managed to happen, regularly, that he came down with something which needed medical attention of some kind, and he would have loved to have had a general practitioner who could talk to him and treat him and not waste hospital resources (or make him go into a hospital, _**again**_), but the fact was that his specialist had moved to Paris just to be the Agrestes' primary care physician (for a number of reasons, most of them with euro signs preceding them). It would have been kind of rude to go to recruit somebody else at this point and, besides, it was important to stick with somebody who knew him and his history, when it was about something as big as possible-organ-rejection.

Still, it sort of sucked that he was stuck in a place that stank of antiseptic … again. They were in the waiting room of this private hospital, now, and it was exclusive enough that there weren't a lot of people there, but Dr Yamaguchi was a busy woman. Adrien and Marinette were playing thumb wars, which Marinette was mostly winning, except when Adrien zoned back into what was happening and used the ungodly length of his ungodly-long fingers to snatch at her.

"Why do you know so much about organ rejection?" Adrien ventured into the quiet, once he had her thumb pinned. Marinette forgot to struggle, for a second, but then she tapped his thumb with her other hand, and he released her ("That's cheati - oh my god, Marinette!", and he was back at trying to catch her, again!), and it was easier to answer him when she was grinning over a thumb war she had won by way of a perfectly legitimate bit of cheating.

"My guy," she said, "you know, there's a… he's a… he's not really - ugh." She let his hand go, so she could start again, beat red: "He's not really anything. But he's mine. And he had new lungs, as well, recently, so I did a lot of research, you know, it's good to know these things, Adrien. You shouldn't have to freak yourself out about everything, you should do as much research as you can."

He'd been told that all his life, actually.

The game over, Adrien slipped his fingers through Marinette's, instead, and lifted her hand up that way like there was a glass wall, between them, their palms pressed against either side of it, fingers reaching through the cracks. "Dr Yamaguchi says I should know everything I can," he agreed, only it sounded a little petulant. Marinette reached up to brush some hair out of his eyes, more because it would demand his attention (his honesty) than because she really minded there being a bit of hair wandering around Adrien's head. He said, "I just want to be normal, you know? I thought it was over, you're meant to get the transplant and then it's happily ever after." And it hadn't been. He just wanted…

His eyes wandered up, to meet hers. He'd been hiding from her, a second ago, but he looked up to meet her eyes, now, and Marinette - Marinette was nice. Marinette was a _really _good friend. She was listening very intently.

He had never told anybody this before, because he had not wanted to .. to worry Ladybug. And nobody else had cared to know.

"Sometimes, it's really scary." Only he asked it like a question. He asked it like he was seeking permission, for something: Sometimes it's really scary? With a question mark at the end.

Marinette's heart lurched.

He asked, further, quickly - "Is that okay?"

"Adrien…"

"Mr Agreste? Dr Yamaguchi will see you, now."

"Yeah," he sniffed in, and stood up, and it was only because of how quickly he responded that Marinette realised Adrien had been hovering on the edge of tears - "I'll see you in a second, Marinette," and now he was running away from her, off to hide with Dr Yamaguchi and talk about immunosuppressants while he left her alone, with that, with the fact that he hurt in a way which he thought was supposed to be secret. He hurt, the verb, he hurt, in hiding, to such a point he thought he had to ask if it was okay to come out.

She had never really been angry before, really she hadn't, but there was something cold and tight at the pit of her stomach that made her angry, about this. What if that had been Chat Noir? What if Chat had parents - and she still really did not believe he did - what if he had parents, and he had been raised like this, to be so quiet in his suffering that he apologised for making noise? And Gabriel had made it worse, somehow, he had made it so Adrien did not feel the _right _to these emotions, even, after raising him to not feel like he could express them, to boot, and what sort of a father did that to their child? There was something cold and festering in her, and it would make her hold Chat Noir tighter, tonight.

But for now, with her nails biting into her palms, she set herself to waiting for Adrien to come back out, and switched on the television so that she had something else to think about.

"-live to footage of Mr Agreste in downtown Paris," the news presenter sounded somewhat surprised, and Marinette actually stood up (Gabriel had been found?), but - no, that had to be wrong. The footage was of… Adrien. This live footage (was it an old broadcast, were they airing the wrong news?) was of Adrien Agreste, the Adrien who had just gone into the doctor's office on this side of Paris, nowhere near the part of Paris Adrien apparently was currently in. "After a melt-down on track at his highschool's sports event day, Adrien seems as healthy as ever, even stopping to buy groceries before greeting reporters-"

… He had left the doctor's… No, Marinette stood up and went over to open the same door Adrien had disappeared inside of. Dr Yamaguchi stopped talking, abruptly, and Adrien - in the seat, there - blinked up at her, confused. "Marinette?" did she.. Need something?

"Oh hi Adrien nice to see you doYouHaveAnIdenticalTwinBrother?"

… Adrien exchanged a glance with Dr Yamaguchi (whose hand was on the phone, wondering whether she had to call the mental health department of the hospital), and he said, with some confusion, "Nnnnnno?"

"Cool, thanks! I just need to check something, I'll be right back, okay?" Marinette didn't wait for an answer. She shut the door, immediately, and went to transform behind - oh, where was a good place to transform? She darted behind a screen of entirely transparent glass which separated the waiting area from the reception, which fortunately hid her from the small number of people who made up the hospital's staff, and darted out a nearby window. What was a fake-Adrien doing out on the town, anyway?

She was going to find out.


	12. Last Sighting

Adrien did not have an identical twin brother, so Ladybug was cautious as she tailed along behind someone who could _only _have been his identical twin brother, _if _this 'someone' was real at all. There were definitely personality traits she could identify as his - this Adrien Agreste smiled like the sun, and reached into crowds where one fan was feeling overshadowed explicitly so he could offer them a bit of the light, and he laughed in just the right way. There were so many traits about him that were strikingly familiar that she might almost have questioned whether her Adrien, the one in the doctor's office, was the real Adrien at all - but of course he was. He had been scared, and he had needed her, and that seemed somehow like it constituted undeniable proof. Evidence. Not that nobody else could ever need her - Marinette was a capable young woman, and everybody she had ever met with any sense _knew _it - but that he could ask, like that, and be answered so wholly. The fact she had answered him so wholly made her sure that _that _Adrien was the real one.

… Somehow.

And besides, this Adrien hadn't even noticed her stalking him, this past hour. He just carried about his day and bought groceries, and some hot noodles, and he paused to smile for the cameras who had found him and the people who did, occasionally, stop him in the street, because being an international top model maybe didn't make him a world-wide celebrity (he would not have been recognised in Kenya, for instance), but Paris was his home city. His face was plastered all over it. Everybody knew who he was, and he thrived on the attention.

Ladybug crouched, in hiding, as she watched Adrien, now. He had stolen away into a side-alley somewhere away from the main art of town, quite far East. The plastic bags of groceries stood propped up on a stray mailbox as he looked around (checking for followers?) and went to poke and prod at a metallic … something. It was a plate of metal the cobblestones ate around, whose bumpy metallic surface could have passed as just another strange bit of the city, covered in a film of dirty debris, if Adrien Agreste himself had not been on his hands and knees to try yanking at it. The knees of his pants were dirty. His hands were covered in filth, and rust. He still yanked on the metallic plate once - twice - until it opened up, the wide metal mouth gaping - yawning - open with a scrape and a wheeze of shuddering metal. It crashed to the ground. A cat, somewhere, bolted out of the alley with an upset mewl, afraid of the sound.

Adrien looked around, again, and maybe he caught sight of her - flashed her a smile - but he did not hesitate to drop into the … sewers? Catacombs? Where was he _going_? - he didn't hesitate to drop into the darkness, below. He didn't reach up to close the little manhole (?), either - it was invitation. He was inviting her down. Ladybug stood up, and then onto her tippy-toes, so that she could see the head of him as he went deeper and deeper down the little ladder, there, until the darkness of the hole swallowed him completely. Too far down to be made out.

Ladybug was not an idiot. She was, actually, a very clever person, and she was actually very much aware that Chat Noir would kill her if she went on a dangerous exploratory mission following what might well be a sentimonster (though what would a sentimonster be doing, buying groceries?!) into, literally, a deep, dark, black pit that he - it - had invited her into, so she pulled out her yoyo to send him a message. He wasn't transformed, at the moment - there were no akumas about, and Chat usually saved his runs of the city (just for fun - or for the workout) for the evening. She'd have to leave him a video message.

"Hey, kitty," she said, and she directed the yoyo at the hole she was about to jump into, so that he knew where she was going, "I'm going to follow a hunch down this way. The Adrien Agreste who's been being filmed out and about downtown isn't the real Adrien, so I think it stands a little game of cat-and-mouse. I'll call again once I'm out. Take care, Chat Noir!" She saluted the camera, with a smile, and a wink (because she knew he would not appreciate being left behind - she would have to win him over with winks and smiles and pats, once she saw him again), and she stopped recording. Ladybug dropped into the hole, and closed the lid behind her.

It was entirely pitch black; Ladybug had to use her yoyo as a torch, turning its screen and holding it as high as she could, to cast its dim light across the arched ceiling and down the long, unlit tunnels. She was in the catacombs. What was not-Adrien doing down here? It was pitch black. He hadn't had his own torch…

"_Ladyb-!" _it was warning, cut abruptly short - she whipped around to meet it, anyway, because of some thrill of - something (that voice, always, would have her responding, regardless of whether she thought he was real or not) -

The yoyo didn't do its job, quite. The figure - too tall to be Adrien - stood just far enough out of its light that the yoyo only caught the glint in his eyes, and the silhouette, tall enough he had to stoop, a little, to stand in this part of the catacombs. "You're not my son," he said. Ladybug could _hear _the smile in his voice.

She wasn't an idiot. She knew only one man who was in the catacombs, at the moment, who might be looking for his son, and she thought, maybe Hawkmoth has found Gabriel Agreste. Maybe Hawkmoth and Mayura are preying on him, sending this sentimonster to lure him in, to _use _him. That's what she thought, even with everything Gabriel had done to and for Adrien, and so she said, "Mr Agreste?"

Hawkmoth stepped into the light. Ladybug was right: he _was _smiling, like all of his Christmas presents had come at once, and all of his wildest dreams had been fulfilled, and while the universe was at it, it had decided to crown him King of the World, to boot. "Ladybug," he crooned, and the way she shifted her stance - to fight him - made him smile even wider, because she did not know that, behind her - had not seen, in the darkness - "Mayura, now!"

Ladybug realised, with some horrible lurch in her chest, that she had made a mistake. She should not have come down here on her own. She should not have come down here at all.

"Yes, sir." The voice came from behind her, and she tried to turn - she did - but Mayura was already upon her, and then Hawkmoth, from the other direction: two against one. They did not play fair.

The scuffle was short, and silent.

She lost. The earrings came off before she could even finish dialling Chat Noir.

* * *

It was alarming. He had never been the last person to see somebody, before.

That couldn't have been true. Actually, really, he must have been the last person to see Nino, as well, before Nino went off to do his DJ gig at that bar outside of Paris, but that wasn't the _same _as being 'the last person to see a missing person'. Adrien hadn't even had a chance to get home before he had a call from an unknown number, which turned out to be Mrs Dupain-Cheng - Marinette was meant to be home to help with the croissants, today, had she forgotten?

"I'm - sorry, Mrs Dupain-Cheng, Marinette left me in the doctor's office, like, three hours ago. I don't know where she is. Have you tried Alya?" she liked to hang out with Alya, didn't she?

There was a long pause, on the other end of the line. Adrien was just taking his newly-prescribed mild dose of immunosuppressants (they would transition him slowly off his current meds, to prevent any weird bodily reactions, if something was the matter with the new ones); he swallowed down the pills with his glass of water as he waited for Sabine to figure out whatever she was figuring out, with the phone buried in her shoulder. Sabine came back: "No, Alya came here, herself, Marinette missed their homework session. Are you sure you haven't seen her?"

"I'm - sure," that _was _weird, it was terribly unlike Marinette to miss either of those two things. She leapt on the chance to hang out with Alya, and she would not disappoint her parents for the entire world: last week she had come into school coughing up a storm because she hadn't wanted to miss an English test. "Do you want me to call her?"

"It's just ringing through," Sabine fretted - "Tom, he's seen her - when was that, sweetheart, what time should we tell the police?"

They were making a police report? Adrien stood up, so that he could go to his little entryway and pull his overcoat back on. Maybe this was serious. "I don't know - my appointment was 3:30, we'd just started. She said she was going to check on something - can I come over? Maybe I can help," he was not so cocky as to mention his finances, but he meant that maybe his wallet could help, and actually Sabine was quick to agree.

"Yes, that would be nice, Adrien, thank you. She's our girl." Neither she nor Tom were above using what was available to them, even if that meant accepting financial help from a seventeen-year-old they'd met a few months ago.

Adrien thought, Chat has a good chance of finding her. He thought, explicitly, that he would like to be Chat Noir, and go out looking for her, because what chance was there that people would not help Chat Noir to find a missing girl he was looking for? If Chat asked, it would be all over Paris in an instant. It would not be just him looking, but even if it had been, Chat - the superhero - stood a much better chance of finding her than any one civilian on their own did; he could cover a lot more ground. "I'll be right over. Mrs Dupain-Cheng, do you need anything?" it was late, "Have you had dinner? I can grab something, people forget to eat -"

"That's sweet of you, dear, but she sneaks out, sometimes, to see her friend. It's not the first time we've missed her, it's just unlike her to not tell us - I expect she's probably fallen asleep. You know she had that cold last week." All of this sounded very reasonable and measured, except Adrien could hear the way Sabine's voice wavered, uncertain. It was totally unlike Marinette to do anything to disappoint, or worry, her parents. Actually, the fact that she _had _ever sneaked out before was bizarre, but even then, it was totally unlike her to not leave a note, or a text, or… or something. She _knew _how people worried. It had been striking, actually, the extent to which Marinette knew she was loved - she had been teaching _him _to know it, even, she had been cranky when he didn't tell anybody he was sick, or when he didn't tell anybody he needed to sit down, or didn't tell anybody he had been experiencing acute organ rejection and freaking-the-heck-out about it. She would not let someone who loved her worry.

Sabine was finding excuses for her daughter's absence, and Adrien suspected it was because she was hoping that the excuses were true, so he said, "Yeah," and paused to lock his door - "maybe."

Neither of them felt terribly inspired by it, but at least he was playing along. Sabine hung up on him feeling at least a little better that she was managing to keep everybody's panic in check - that was, Adrien thought, the role that she had decided was hers, and he was happy to let her play it - and Adrien got downstairs, phone still in hand. The clock in the corner said 6:45PM. He glanced down the street which reached into the shopping district - it was a Friday night, so late-night shopping was a thing, but the stores would be closing down, in the next fifteen minutes, anyway. What if Marinette didn't come back tonight? They'd all be out looking for her. They'd need water, and torches, and some way to contact one another (portable batteries, for their phones?). And dinner, they were going to need dinner, whether Sabine had forgotten that she was a human being who got hungry sometimes, or not.

It was better to pick all of those things up, now, rather than waiting until they needed them and nobody was ready to sell them. Adrien would, genuinely, break into the stores they needed to get into and leave money on the counter for whatever he took, but that was not actually very legal, and it was better by far to not risk Chat Noir's good name (they'd make him out to be a cat burglar!) when he had the opportunity to do it the right way.

Adrien went to make his purchases, Marinette's phonenumber ringing through in his hand, the whole way.

* * *

**A/N:** Short one for you guys! Poor Marinette. She was such a nice girl. As an update on my life - I finished my Honours! It was super fun and worth the effort of doing in between writing this fic. I am on to better things next year but in the meantime I'm finished with full-time study, so I have a lot more free time. It's nice to have a fic to sink it into!

I expect this fic to wrap up in the next 5ish chapters, so sit tight for that. Thanks for reading & reviewing!


	13. The Answer is Yes

It felt sort of unfair, that the universe had decided to take two of his favourite people and make them vanish, both at once - but then, Adrien was a very unlucky sort of a guy. Maybe he would _get _lucky, and they'd be missing together - Marinette and Ladybug would be helping each other out of the catacombs under Paris - but when he transformed into Chat Noir to use his superhero powers to find Marinette (or at least to _look _for her), he had a waiting message. This happened. The kwamis didn't tell them about every single new message they sent to one another (a _little _bit out of necessity - Chat did sometimes like to talk a _lot_), and Ladybug had hardly sent this one with a sense of urgency, behind it. It was just a normal message, which Chat opened, expecting it to be something about wanting to trade shifts for patrol or asking a question about housekeeping and statistics, like Ladybug did, sometimes, trying to keep on top of which direction this or that akuma came from, to see if they could track down Hawkmoth.

Instead, it was a timestamped message which promised she would be right back - talk soon - except she was not right back at all.

"We'll find her, Sabine," he had just promised Mrs Dupain-Cheng, three minutes ago, and now he was on some rooftop a little way away from the bakery, and his partner was missing. Ladybug on his staff smiled, and waved, and clicked the video off.

That was hours ago.

His heart settled into his throat - she did this. She _did _this, and he hated it. She just went off and did dangerous things, alone, sometimes, and it used to be that he could understand it - it used to be '_oh sure Ladybug, I probably couldn't breathe down there anyway' _\- but this time, what excuse did she have? It had been months. He'd thought she had stopped doing it, that she had a partner now and she trusted him to _**be **_that partner, for her. She was lucky she was pretty, when she winked at the camera, and lucky she was missing (ugh!), because he would have been very upset with her and that was a conversation they were going to have, actually, because she had to be able to rely on him. It had been getting worse and worse and worse and he had hated every time she'd left him behind out of necessity, had tried to relinquish the miraculous more than just one time because Ladybug deserved a partner she could count on - a partner she could _**trust, **_and she obviously did not trust him -

They were going to talk about this. Because it was bad of her, properly bad, to go in without him.

But for now, she was pretty, and she was missing, and she was his, in the same way that he, Chat, was hers. They were each other's, and as much as he was worried about Marinette - genuinely scared for his friend - there had already been a search and rescue party in place well before Adrien had shown up. Sabine and Tom were organising groups of people into different sections of the city Marinette might be in, and making sure everybody had a teammate.

There was one person alive in the whole of Planet Earth who knew that Ladybug was missing.

There was one person alive in the whole of Planet Earth who knew the hole she had stolen away into.

It was not nearly so big a decision, which girl to go after, as it might have been, for somebody who did not consider himself Ladybug's, through and through. Ladybug's partner, Ladybug's teammate, Ladybug's cat, and Ladybug's, through and through.

"Sorry, Marinette," he did say, out loud, but Chat Noir hooked the staff back onto his belt and he went after Ladybug, anyway.

* * *

"You'll never get away with this!"

"Ms Dupain-Cheng," Hawkmoth was very tired of this conversation, "I assure you, after having had you _personally _organise my failure for the past _several _years," he turned the earrings over in his hands, playing with them, as languidly and easily as a satisfied feline: "my goals have adjusted. I am not aiming to _get away _with my wish. I am aiming to _**make**_ it."

There wasn't a great deal to do, while they waited for Chat Noir to arrive. Neither one of them had said aloud that that's what they were waiting for, but they both knew it - Ladybug knew she had sent Chat that message. Hawkmoth, meanwhile, knew that that stray would follow 'his lady' anywhere and everywhere, and - in the very likely scenario that Ladybug had had the foresight to warn her partner of her impending disappearance - all it was was a waiting game. They could fetch Adrien once he'd dealt with this opportunity, and made his wish - or maybe, even, Gabriel would wish that the whole family was together again, that they loved one another, that Adrien had never become so noncompliant and rebellious. Maybe he could wish all of these issues away. Even at the cost of imprisonment, for life - even at the cost of his own life - Gabriel would keep going until he had made that wish, and provided for his family. _Fixed _his family, in whatever way that needed to happen - Emilie's return or Adrien's forced, bought love, he would claim both. The consequences were, well, inconsequential.

He was so off-hand about it it made Ladybug - Marinette Dupain-Cheng - shiver.

She was his son's friend, you know. Gabriel did remember her. She was the one who had had the bizarre idea that her opinion on how he raised _**his **_child (and that's what Gabriel thought, possessively - _**his, **_as in belonging to him) mattered, and no wonder. Ladybug was full of grandiose ideas about the worth of her own opinions. Actually, what was _exce_ptionally irritating was the fact the _sentimonster _Adrien, the one based on the sentimonster's best impressions of who Adrien Agreste was as a person - moments before Moyura had faithfully destroyed it, it had tried to warn Ladybug of his presence.

To _**warn **_Ladybug!

What sort of a person was his son turning out to be? No. No, it would be good, once the wish was made and Adrien was back under control, and Emilie was _back_, at all.

Somehow, the news of Hawkmoth's adjusted goals - he rolled his eyes - managed to surprise Ladybug, though. They must have, because she faltered, and then Marinette stepped forward to ask, "You're not going to wish to .. take over Paris?" because she, personally, had always assumed it was about the power, for him. In the many times they had come up against Hawkmoth, in the past, it had been clear the man was hellbent on maintaining some position of authority - he had always loved, _**loved **_that they were only children he was forcing into fights, he had loved the feeling of control that had given him, Ladybug had _**seen **_that Hawkmoth chased that. Marinette knew that that's what this man liked, and she was convinced, when they fought to protect Paris, that - should Hawkmoth ever succeed - the whole city was at stake. Maybe the whole planet. Every wish came at a price, yes, but she had never considered that the wish might not be evil, to begin with.

But making a wish to take over Paris with the intention of immediately being caught and incarcerated didn't really fit with, you know, logic and reason.

He sat himself down in front of Ladybug's makeshift prison cell. She was just a civilian, now; there was no way she would be able to fight her way out this small, empty tomb among the catacombs, with an ordinary sentimonster there to guard her. A sentimonster, and Hawkmoth, himself. "For a hero of Paris," Hawkmoth critiqued her, "you have always been exceptionally bad at understanding why people do things. Do you think you can decide someone is 'bad', and that means everything they do is meant to make the world burn?"

"People aren't bad. Sometimes they _do_ bad things." Chat Noir had taught her that, actually. "And you have done a lot of them, Hawkmoth." She said his name like a swear.

He smiled. "Well, Marinette," he used her name, because it made her shiver, to be known by Hawkmoth - "Let me share with you something about _my _life. My wife is dead. My son has left me. Do you know loss?"

The answer was no.

Marinette had known fear, before, but never once had she known loss. She wished - reached, absently, a hand lifting in the direction of where he should have been - she wished for her partner. Chat Noir should have been there. He would have been able to say yes. She had never known anybody in her entire life who knew it as intimately and as badly as Chat Noir, nor as quietly. She had thought, for almost half a decade, that he was an orphan - but he wasn't. He had a father. All of Paris thought he was an orphan, but he had told her recently he had a father, still, though his mother had died.

She wondered whether the circumstances under which Hawkmoth's son had left him were similar. Whether his son hadn't left, so much as felt the absence of his father so badly, and for so long, that he eventually decided to move on.

Hawkmoth told her, "You cannot imagine it."

Ladybug answered, "I don't need to." She liked the way it made Hawkmoth squirm - the way he opened his mouth to argue - he had thought he was making a huge, sweeping, amazing argument which would knock her off her feet, but, "I have known people who knew loss. Do you know Chat Noir lost his mother? Do you know he is not bitter, he is not fighting teenagers so he can - what? What, bring her back?"

"And imagine if he had lost you." He shrugged. "He is your partner, is he not? Emilie is my teammate. I will bring her back or die trying. Surely you know that is what you are, to each other. We wouldn't be waiting for him in these stinking catacombs -"

"Emilie?" Marinette breathed, with some real horror, now, on her friend's behalf. Emilie - as in..? "Mr Agreste?" poor Adrien. Poor Adrien, whose father was not only on the lam in the catacombs but also _**freakin' Hawkmoth **_-

"It doesn't matter, now. Once I have made my wish, Emilie will be back and Adrien will be returned to me. I -"

"_Returned?! _You can't just -"

Something clattered, nearby. They both - Marinette and Gabriel-Agreste-aka-Hawkmoth - shot to their feet, turned to attention, but nobody came bolting around the corner - there was no element of surprise - they shot to their feet and stilled, to listen, which is the only reason they could hear the footsteps racing (racing, hard and fast!) down the long, pitch-black corridor, now getting farther and farther away. With the sentimonster still there, to guard her, Hawkmoth raced into the - his foot kicked something. Chat Noir's staff launched across the rocky floor and slammed into the wall, there, and for an instant Hawkmoth thought that maybe Chat was lying in wait, actually, ready to come to attack him, but a second later light from the manhole broke into the empty hallway, and the silhouette of Chat Noir - spluttering - shot up out of it. The staff vanished in Hawkmoth's hands - he had let go the transformation.

* * *

GetAwayGetAwayGetAwayGetAwayGetAwayGetAwayGetAwayGet -

"Kid! _Kid! Kid_! Take the - _Adrien_!" Plagg was flying with him, streak of black in the deep of the night, and Adrien's hands were - not - his lungs burned - he flung himself onto this fire escape and slammed his back against the wall, hiding, he was hiding, he had to get away. If he had stayed there Hawkmoth would have sensed him and what use was he going to be when Ladybug did not have her miraculous and Adrien was asking to be akumatised, what the - what was he - he had to get away because if Hawkmoth akumatised him now then the whole of -

Something leapt into his throat. His hands shot to his hair, to pull at the roots. He sank down the wall. Calm down.

He had to calm down, if he did not calm down he would be akumatised, he had to calm down. He had had formal training in how to - his father had _**paid **_for formal training in how to calm down, he had - he gasped in, in the first drag of real air he had breathed probably ever in his entire life it felt like a new sensation -

Plagg said, "This is reeeeeeeeeeeeeally not good, Adrien, this has happened with my Chosens before but never with Ladybug already captured. Take the ring off," and it was so gentle, but it still stung. It stung badly. Maybe, yes, it made sense - yes okay he had to take it off yes okay because if he was akumatised, then letting Hawkmoth know he was Chat Noir was probably just asking for the city to be destroyed but -

He said, "I can't," he couldn't. His hands would not leave his hair. They were entangled. Plagg would have to make do. He c-

"Breathing exercises, then. Breathe in, four seconds, hold it four and let it go for six, I'll count you. Ready? One…"

It struck him as so unlike Plagg to be coaching him through breathing exercises that Adrien let go some bark of strangled laughter, followed closely by a stabbing, twisting guilt which settled right into the pit of his stomach, because how could he - how had he - when his father was _**Hawkmoth**_, when he had let his father go about terrorising the city for - without even noticing? Was that true? Had he not noticed his father's absence, for years, had he not known that his father was doing 'work' which mustn't have had anything to do with the company (because Adrien _ran _the company, and Hawkmoth disappeared sometimes for weeks at a time to do work Adrien never saw the end of) -

"You didn't know."

"_God_," Adrien broke, at least, which was nice because it meant that at least he did not feel like crying, anymore: all he felt was like a barren wasteland of nothing and empty and sand that soaked up the heat of his anger and the lump of tears in his throat. The rest of his emotion was thrust out of him all at once and then he was just empty. All of a sudden he was a desert wasteland and that was better than being Adrien-Chat-Noir-some-kind-of-SUPERhero, letting-Hawkmoth-live-under-the-same-roof, but it was not really a vast improvement.

He worried that if he moved from this place, curled up here, hands pulling hard at his hair, breath stuttery and uncertain - if he moved, he might break a second time, and he did not know where that would leave him.

But at least he didn't think he would be akumatised, like this.

He didn't know what to do.

Ladybug was down there. Ladybug - Marinette - Ladybug was down there. He had literally turned and run.

He had to go back.

She would kill him if he went in all guns blazing without a plan.

What must she have thought, having seen Chat Noir come, and try, and fail? He had failed to save her. He had literally turned away and run.

_Adrien will be returned to me,_ his father had said. Hawkmoth had said.

Hawkmoth had bought him lungs. Hawk-the-actual-real-moth had said _**my**__ son_ like they had any relationship to each other at all.

What if he just threw up here, would anybody complain about a fire escape covered in Adrien Agreste's sick?

He needed a plan.

His phone rang.

"Adrien, sweetheart, where are you? Rose couldn't find you when she went to your meeting point. We have been worried, young man, you come -"

"Mrs Dupah," he broke into tears, mostly of relief - it had totally slipped his mind that he was not utterly alone, and the realisation that he wasn't- that he could- that there were still… people, out there… he broke into tears, great heaving sobs, scared and sick and tired and afraid. Maybe an akuma would come. He had run as hard and fast as he could in the opposite direction, wasn't it true akumas could lose range? Maybe he could… breathe here…

"We're coming to get you, darling," so full of authority - this woman was where Marinette got it, Ladybug's authority _bled _from this woman, Sabine was smart and capable and she would help, god, she would help, "drop a pin for us. Do you need an ambulance?"

He shook his head, no.

"Out loud, sweetheart, it's a phonecall."

"No, ma'am," he barely managed the second word.

"Okay. Okay, Adrien. We're coming. You hold on."

* * *

They wanted to know if he had found Marinette. What he had been running from - because he was still panting, when they arrived, and he had tripped into the mud at least thrice, and obviously, he had been running.

What would he tell them about that?

Adrien let Sabine Dupain-Cheng wrap him up in the handknitted blanket Sabine's mother back in China had made - it smelt of tea - and he made no complaints as she guided him into the back of Tom's minivan. These two had been a team, together, out looking for their daughter. They had come together, now, instead, to find their son.

"Are you alright?" Tom asked it, but he didn't expect Adrien to answer - the car rumbled to life - he just asked because he felt compelled to. Just asked because he cared about the answer, even if the answer was no.

Sabine pulled his head into her shoulder, and patted his hair. The way Marinette - Ladybug - sometimes did. He was still wrapped up in his blanket. He swallowed - sniffled - "I don't want to cry on your -"

"Nonsense. It's the Comfort Blanket." Adrien could hear the capital letters in the way she said it. And she was, seriously, fiercely defensive of something - him, maybe - when she added, promised, "You can breathe with us."

But Marinette was still down there.

But there was no time to breathe.

But he couldn't.

He shivered, into Sabine Dupain-Cheng, and let himself settle, until he had at last run out of tears. The minivan was still rocking, back and forth. It had been an hour. They had stopped for petrol, one time.

He said, into the quiet, "Mr and Mrs Dupain-Cheng?"

"You can sleep, sweetheart, Rose went out to search with her girlfriend, and Luka. They're brother and sister."

He said - whispered - "I know where Marinette is."

Tom slammed on the brakes.

Adrien would never for the rest of his life forget way her parents looked at him, because he said that, now, after crying so hard he could not breathe, for literally an hour. They were pale and haunted and flinching. They did not want to hear what he said next. Tom reached out for his wife, maybe to comfort and maybe to _seek _comfort.

Adrien said, quickly, "She's fine, she's alive," (Marinette's parents breathed out, releasing something genuinely horrifying), "I j- she's- she's mine, and I'm Chat Noir, and Hawkmoth is my father and he has her and I don't know what to do usually she would have the plans and -"

"Marinette is _Ladybug_?" Sabine -

"She can't be, you see how she speaks about her, she's _scared_ of her!"

"She would have told us," Sabine agreed, "Marinette isn't-"

"Marinette's pretty clever, I don't know anybody clever who isn't scared of Ladybug." He was still holding his breath. His lungs ached. There was nothing left to do except to ask, here, now - his fingers curled around this little blanket - "Please, will you help? I can't, I don't know what to do. I'm scared. I _can't_ be akumatised and I can't - I can't breathe."

It didn't actually matter whether they believed him, really. When Adrien asked like that?

The answer was yes.

* * *

**A/N:** Hello again! Here is another chapter! I hope you guys enjoy it. I am looking forward to wrapping this one up soon - we are headed toward our ending, whether it is happy or not. Thanks for the reviews & general support!

I've had a few ideas for a next story and am interested in what you guys think - android!Adrien AU, Faerie!AU, or swordartonline!AU? Let me know which one you vote for bc they are all sitting in my head waiting to be written! Also open to suggestions, or requests for short fics via my tumblr (same as my name here!).


	14. Defeat

Ladybug would never forgive him for involving her parents in this. They were about to knock shoulders with who had been, essentially, their nemesis for the past several years - and the both of them had scars, to prove it. What would Hawkmoth do to people who did not have the supersuits to protect them? The entire reason they'd been keeping their identities secret, all these years, was that they had not wanted their families to be hurt. In theory, Gabriel would be just as eager to defend Adrien as Sabine and Tom had been, to defend their daughter; in theory, their identities were secret because if they hadn't been, they'd be spending their superhero lifetimes yanking those who loved them out of harm's way.

But Ladybug was in danger, now, and he was her partner.

Adrien wasn't sure if he would be able to help her. At some base level, he did not know what would happen when he came face-to-face with his father, again, after all of this. He felt sort of empty-handed, like he had turned up to school without his homework, even though he had done it last night, just it wasn't in his bag. Would the teacher remember to ask for it?

Would he remember any of the answers?

But he was her partner, and that meant that he had to do what he could to protect her, and get her out of her makeshift prison in the catacombs beneath Paris. Adrien was in love with that girl, and if she could fault him for it then she was probably right - she usually was - but she would forgive him. He had involved the Dupain-Chengs because he had not known what to do next, not because he wanted them to be hurt, or even really involved. He had gone to his nearest source to Ladybug for direction when he was lost. Sue him.

Still, their plan made him queasy.

* * *

"Father?"

His voice echoed in the tunnels. All the way down. Adrien made it something like a harsh-whisper, a seeking-out that sounded confused, more than anything. He had just overheard his father's plan; Sabine had been the one to raise the fact that actually, this didn't have to be violent at all. He didn't like the sound of it (actually, it unsettled him, how he wanted that catharsis), but she wasn't wrong - this didn't have to be a fight. Absolutely nobody had to be hurt. Gabriel's plan was to lure Chat Noir here, but it was luring Adrien, as well, and they could play into that.

It hurt, to watch his own father's coming-alive, in response to him. Adrien saw the way Gabriel rose to it. Since when?

Since when had he had that response from his father, since when had Gabriel ever wanted him, except when Adrien could do something for him? "I thought you must be here," Adrien said, still uncertain.

Gabriel opened his arms. "Adrien."

Adrien stayed where he was, though, at the mouth of the tunnel, there, still in the light of the manhole. "What are you doing down here? The police are looking for you. Father, we can -"

"The police don't understand."

"Understand what?" it came out as a stronger challenge than Adrien intended it to be, and for a fleeting moment he worried he was pushing too hard, going too far - but Gabriel seemed to have expected this. His arms dropped.

"I was doing it to protect you. Us. Everything I have done, it is to protect our family."

Something sick twisted in Adrien's stomach. He stayed very still there, because he could not think of something to say that was not scathing.

"Your father is Hawkmoth, Adrien," came a quiet little voice - Ladybug's (Marinette's) - from the shadows. She at least sounded apologetic. This was information she had to impart on him - it was information she knew would hurt him - but it was her duty. Adrien had to know. "You should -" tell someone, is what she was going to say, only Gabriel turned to glare at her, sharply - yanked one of his arms forward - and she let out some little cry, instead.

Adrien's stomach was no longer twisted - he took a step forward, in visceral response to Marinette's pain. He did not know what his father had on her. Was she tied? Was she hanging? He couldn't see, he couldn't tell her, he couldn't -

"Who is that?" accusation. He had to do this properly. If Gabriel figured him out, then this entire thing would fall through; right now, right this instant, if Adrien could work his way toward his father… if he could just get a hold of the Moth Miraculous, by surprise…

"This is not how I wished for this to happen," Gabriel told him, with some annoyance. Adrien had never done much to subscribe to Gabriel's grand plans.

Adrien took a step forward - another step, because he had to see her. Just because he had to see her. His eyes were not done adjusting to the light; he probably was not meant to see her. Gabriel had designed this for Chat Noir, who could see in the dark. Chat, who would be able to see how badly she was restrained, and who would respond accordingly. What did his father want Chat Noir to do?

Be horrified? Relieved?

What had Gabriel's grand plan actually been?

"Father, who is she?" insistent.

"I wouldn't worry about her."

"You're holding someone **prisoner**?" Adrien crossed the rest of the distance, now, so that he could reach out for the flat, waist-high boulder that kept Ladybug (Marinette, he reminded himself, again) inside her makeshift cell -

"I wouldn't touch that," Gabriel warned, an instant too late. The most cynical side of Adrien wondered if it was on purpose.

The boulder electrocuted him. The tingle was brief at first, but then the boulder itself lifted, a little, and the shock of electricity raced through him, hot and angry - he yelped, and yanked his hand away.

Marinette said, from just the other side of it, "It's a sentimonster."

If she had had her yoyo, she could have sailed out over the top of this boulder, no problems. If Hawkmoth (Gabriel) had not been standing there, himself, she probably could have leapt out over it, without quite touching it. But neither of those things were true, so all it took to lock Marinette Dupain-Cheng in this self-made cage was a sentimonster with hardly anything senti- about it. This must have been what she'd been hurt on, before - his father must have yanked her into it.

Adrien stumbled back, and tripped, and he stayed down. There, on the ground, that was where he stayed, because he wasn't sure what he would do if he got up again.

"Did you not hear?"

"What?" what?

"Your father is Hawkmoth," Gabriel repeated Marinette for him. He enunciated the words especially clearly.

Adrien's stomach dropped. He should have reacted to that. That should have been something that knocked him off his feet, like this. He managed, struggling, "What?" again, but he would never in his life ever be able to find the same sort of crippling horror he had felt, when he'd first found out. He could not fake that.

"I am Hawkmoth."

It was so matter of fact. Adrien didn't understand. What reaction did he want? What was this stupid game they were playing? Why was it like this?

He ached, to reach out to Ladybug. Instead, he hoisted himself to his feet, again, and turned to face his father. "No, you're not."

"I am."

"Hawkmoth wants -"

"To bring your mother back, Adrien." Gabriel said it with such feeling. "We could bring her back, together. This girl - your friend, I know, but she has been holding your mother back, from you. She owns the Ladybug Miraculous. With that, and Chat Noir's, we can -"

"Wish her back," Adrien realised.

He managed the breathlessness, anyway. He managed the breathless realisation that that was what his father's goal was.

"At a price," Marinette said - she was up, now, one hand on the arch of this rock, the other reaching out to him through the darkness. Please, her body language said. Please, come into her, don't listen to him. Don't listen to him. "Adrien, Miraculous wishes always come at a great cost. There is no way of knowing who would have to die to take your mother's place - or how many."

Adrien's mother was long-dead. For years, and years, longer than she deserved, she had wanted to die. He had seen her ache for it. It was why Adrien had refused treatments, himself; it was why he had sent his father away. Had that been what drove Gabriel to this? That Adrien refused to be arbitrarily strung along, so he had to find some way to force Emilie back to life, back to suffering? He felt sick. Adrien swallowed it.

"But you could bring her back," he made himself say.

"We could. We could be a family," Gabriel was relieved his son was listening to sense - he reached out, again - "Adrien. Chat Noir will come for his partner, and you can help me - we have three Miraculouses, we could wield them against him, he would not stand a chance."

"Three?" had he miscounted?

"You would wield the Ladybug Miraculous. We only need the ring."

… Oh.

.. Hawkmoth would literally hand Ladybug's Miraculous back to him.

Well, then.

"But what about - she is my friend. What will happen to Marinette?"

"Adrien," Marinette pleaded.

He ignored her.

"She will be free as soon as we make the wish. She will get in the way. You understand."

He puffed, mostly with laughter. "She does." Get in Gabriel's way, that is. All the time. He loved her, she was so awesome. "Where are the earrings? When can we start?"

Gabriel patted the marble sentimonster's head, and it shifted to block the doorway more wholly. He told Adrien, "This way."

* * *

The very last thing Ladybug expected to see, next, was Chat Noir. He just had no business in being the next person she saw, because as far as she knew he wasn't even coming - Maruya had been posted at the entrance, now, and she was set to catch Chat the next time he tried to come in. How had he gotten past her, without anybody down here hearing that?

"Cataclysm," Chat said, and the sentimonster crumbled away into a pitch-black feather. He tossed Ladybug her earrings. It was all very gung-ho. "Maruya will have felt that, milady, there isn't time to regroup." Maruya would be on her way down any second - that was the only fight they could not really avoid. Marinette transformed ("Nice work, kitty!", because who was she to argue with a Chat Noir who took that much charge?), and they were halfway out of the cell when she caught his arm.

"Hawkmoth's that way, he has my friend -"

He held up the cravat for her. So she could see it. "I've got it covered. You know what? I'm beginning to think you underestimate me, Bugab-"

"Get down!" Ladybug tackled him out of the way of Maruya's oncoming attack, and they didn't have the breath to speak in, after that. Ladybug did not get to ask why Hawkmoth did not come to join the fight. She did not get to ask where Adrien had disappeared to.

It was probably a good thing. Getting the cravat had been harder than Adrien had anticipated - and he really, genuinely, honestly did not know what condition his father was in. He didn't know. Gabriel had flung himself into it, with fury (his son - his own son! - was Chat Noir?!), all-guns-blazing, a reckless disregard for his own life. Adrien had not tried to hurt him.

But he did not know what condition his father was in, and he was not worried to think about it, now, when Maruya was trying to tear his partner apart.

The reign of terror held above Paris was put to rest below her, in the darkest of catacombs, in relative silence, aside from Maruya's - Nathalie's - angry screams.


	15. Good night

It was days, after. Almost a week, now.

Hawkmoth's identity had come out. He was in hospital, and was yet to wake up - Adrien wasn't sure if he cared (this was a lie, but one that helped him to sleep at night) - at the very least, Adrien was yet to visit him. What do you say to someone like that? After that? He hadn't left his father to die. The doctors had gone to retrieve him soon enough. But the tunnel had caved in on itself when Chat had had him pinned against a wall, and the last thing Gabriel would have remembered was that when Chat Noir (_his son_) dove out of the way, he did not think (was that the truth?) to pull Gabriel out of the way, with him. There was so much Chat had to say about that. So little, too.

Like there was all this space for words, a gaping maw the size of a collapsed tunnel, and all of the words were just… crushed, by rock, and stone. Impenetrable.

Marinette had asked if he was okay, before. In the days since, he remembered several instances - and she had reached up to pat his hair, and kiss his temple, and as easy as it would have been if she had been angry, she was not. Adrien was staying at the bakery, now, because the media were camped out in front of his apartment building, ready to ask if he had had any idea - did he know - why did he let his father do it - why didn't he _say_ anything?

The Dupain-Chengs were good enough to let him stay in his room. Ladybug - Marinette - dragged him out to do the exercise regimen, and brought up food to eat with him so that he did not break down physically while he processed everything that _had _happened.

Adrien had never been a very angry person. He had never seen the point in it, much. He wondered, thinking back on it (the _rage _in the man, when he had realised Adrien was Chat Noir, had been Chat Noir all along), whether Hawkmoth had taken that anger, from him. Borrowed it, and made it his own. Maybe Gabriel hoarded pain, grip viscerally tight, like he could choke suffering into love, again; maybe his father had not accepted that loving someone could turn into losing them.

It seemed oddly fitting, that that was the sort of man who Hawkmoth had turned out to be, but Adrien didn't know how he had missed it. As well as not having any idea whatsoever how he could not have noticed, being Paris' superhero, how he could have overlooked the fact that his _**own father **_was The Actual Evil Supervillain, Hawkmoth - as well as that he did not know how he had not … seen the way that Emilie's death had torn his father to shreds. He had known it had hurt (it hurt them both), but how could Adrien not have known that it could have driven Gabriel to _this_?

How could he call himself a superhero? A son?

The lungs he was using were tight, when he thought about it too long, and he often had to blink something misty away from his eyes. For the record, he thought to himself, if the Dupain-Chengs had not taken him like this - if Marinette did not still sneak into the living room late past midnight, to slip onto the couch beside him and let him finally rest - he would have made it through. He had survived the theft and transplant of a new pair of lungs, hadn't he? He could breathe cool air that burned on the way down, but it got there. He did not, would not, suffocate, in this. He just choked. The Dupain-Chengs helped, but he could have risen above this, because the only thing he had ever known to drag him down was anger (he hoped never to be angry again), and he could not find anger, for his father. He was lying in the ICU, right now. He was not a threat to anyone. He was dying, the hospital had said he was probably dying.

Anger wasn't something he felt, though Adrien wondered if maybe he ought to.

"What are you thinking about?"

Marinette put the little tray down. It had a pot of Chinese herbal tea, one of those low, ceramic things - Adrien had always thought they were very pretty. The little cups could fit into the palm of his hand, if he wanted. She knelt down beside it - beside him - and poured the tea, trying to pretend she was not nervous, only she was his partner and had always been his partner.

He knew.

Adrien took the steaming cup she offered him with a polite, "Thank you."

Marinette came to sit beside him, with her own.

They each started speaking at the same time ("I don't-" from Marinette, and, "Just -"). They stopped. Marinette blushed, and plopped herself down a little bit harder than she probably meant to, legs crossed, waiting for Adrien to continue. He swallowed. He watched the steam rise in swirls from the cup of hot tea - Sabine's recipe. It was strong.

"I'm thinking about," he started, again, meek, because Marinette had asked. She nodded, quickly. Marinette did not know how to _help _him - she did not know what to _do _for him - and it was getting scary, that Adrien had not come down to join them for after-dinner games of scrabble, all week. When had he ever not wanted her there, with him, before? She didn't know how to not _be _wanted.

Adrien said, "There's this… I'm thinking about this old, um -" (when did he ever say 'um'?), "spiritual thing, I guess. I don't remember where it's from, it's just - something I picked up when I was learning about .. cultural things. For my languages. I think Japanese." He offered his cup over, so that Marinette could 'cheers' it. He had to lean into her space to do it, and she did nothing to discourage him. The cups clinked. "It really helped, when mum died. It was this idea that… the story goes, just before you're born, you have an audience with God, or several Gods, or some - all-powerful conglomerate of beings. And they say, 'You're going to go on a journey, in life, and then you will return to us. To make sure that it is a happy life, we will grant you three wishes - you will not die before each of these wishes comes true.' And you know - people can wish for anything. Some people want to become famous. Some people want to have…" he breathed out, "a son. A happy family." Did it count, for his mother, if that fell apart after she was gone? Did the wishes count if they were temporary? He shrugged, "And most people, well, you know. They end their wishes with, their third wish is, 'I wish to die in my sleep, peacefully, in my old age, surrounded by my loved ones'. But there are others -" his voice broke, and he had to swallow over it, the immediate flush of embarrassment. This was only Ladybug; he loved being here with her; he didn't know what it was, that made him embarrassed to be feeling this, now, here, but she reached out and put a hand on his shoulder and he continued anyway, past the lump in his throat. "There are some people who say, 'I want to die, giving others a chance.'" He swallowed, again. "And my mum, she stayed - longer than she wanted - because they could test. And see what worked. And what didn't. And the girl I took these lungs from -"

"That wasn't you, Adrien."

His breathing hitched. He waited several moments, through long, drawn-out breaths, to be able to speak without breaking; he knew how to do this. He had had formal training on how to make himself disappear, all his life. "The idea is they were finished." He laughed at himself. Meek. "That some people live more in 20 years than others do in 80."

"That's really nice," Marinette said, voice so soft it was barely above a whisper.

"I'm afraid he's going to die," he gasped - managed - choked, "and what's it going to be, I - I wish to die when I finish making people suffer, I wish -" a sniff, and some miserable laughter, "I wish I can die while I'm in the middle of trying to destroy -"

"I wish I could protect the people I love, or die trying."

"I shouldn't _need _that!" great, gasping protest, but at last - at last - Adrien turned into Marinette's shoulder, and let her hold him, and put her fingers through his hair, and for the first time in a week Marinette felt like she could breathe. For the first time in days she felt like she had her partner, back, again, and no longer doing his best to hide. "I shouldn't need that to be over this, he's _Hawk_moth, I shouldn't _care_-"

"Chat Noir, when have you _ever _not cared about the people of Paris?"

So he cried on her shoulder even though he had no right to, because she didn't tell him off.

* * *

"Thank you all for coming out, tonight."

He put an arm, around Marinette's waist - to have her close - she slipped an arm around him, as well. There was something unfailable, about their partnership, something that made him stronger than he was without it. He did not worry he would not be able to stand, with her there beside him, even though his voice was weak, and his eyes were sunken, and his hair had seen better days.

Cameras flashed. People were whispering amongst themselves, because his voice was too quiet to be chattering over - Adrien did not have a microphone. He was just out in front of the hospital, here, with Marinette beside him.

"I want to answer some of your questions. No, I had no idea. Ladybug and Chat Noir will both attest to that." He breathed. "I know some of you were good enough to track down the owner of these lungs. I don't want that name circulating. I don't want to cost that family anything more. And no, I have no intention of visiting her grave," murmurings, in the crowd - Adrien took a moment to breathe. "I don't think it would be fair."

Marinette squeezed him, a moment. Just a short reminder that she was there. (She would not have been capable of a tall reminder.) (Because she was so short.) (He tried hard to find humour, these days.)

Adrien swallowed. He opened his mouth again. "My father, Hawkmoth, passed away a short time ago, in his hospital bed."

The crowd of media surged to its feet, all at once. It was only because Marinette was there that Adrien did not flinch, though she did - Marinette had never been a natural in front of the cameras - he was reassured, somewhat, that this was not just overwhelming for him. This was a shared experience. If they could tackle akumas the size of the Eiffel tower and wrangle would-be supervillains, they could do a media conference in the dead of night, in their pyjamas. Adrien's turn to squeeze her, now, and he felt Marinette steel herself beside him. He was, again, wildly grateful to have this girl, this remarkable girl, as his partner.

"I wanted to make that announcement as soon as I could. Paris deserves that closure."

Marinette wrapped her arm tighter around his waist, reaching, so that she could interlock her fingers with his. He held her hand, there, and turned to kiss her cheek, just because he could. Because he was glad to have her there. Because he would not have felt whole, with somebody else's lungs in his body, if he had not had someone to remind him that he still was. He still counted. Even like this.

"I might have plans to stay in the fashion industry -" they could make a label together; he had not spoken to Marinette about this, yet, though - "but I will not be keeping the Agreste corporation. Once the estate has been distributed I will be taking steps to liquidate assets and distribute this year's profits to a number of charities interested in the rebuilding of Paris. You can find a full list of nominated recipients on our website. That money will be distributed as transparently as we can manage it."

There were more murmurings, in the crowd. Adrien breathed. He took a deep breath, all the way in, and all the way out.

"And I am sorry for what my father has done to this city. I know how it has suffered. I know what it is like to be scared, and to not be able to breathe. I did not know, and it is not my fault," repeated, again, like yelling into the abyss and hoping it might not open wider to swallow him whole, "but I would not wish that on my worst enemy. Much less a city that I love."

Marinette kissed his cheek, back. He almost smiled.

"I'll be stepping out of the limelight for a while. I haven't ever really had a chance to - you know - be a kid. With the people I love." He swallowed. "That's an opportunity I don't take lightly. I love this city, and these people -" shaking his head, no, "and I don't agree with how I got it, this opportunity, but while I have it I can _breathe_. And I am going to fill my lungs up."

Adrien breathed. He breathed all the way in, and all the way out.

"Thank you again for coming out. I won't be taking questions, I'm sorry, I'm keeping the staff waiting." On arrangements, for the body. "The only thing we're sure of right now is he will be donating. I hope it brings somebody else everything that these lungs have brought me." For better and for worse. The bad bits of life were non-negotiable - sometimes life was going to _suck _\- but it was not lost on him, that at least he was still breathing.

"Good night."


End file.
